Oracle's Digital Assistant AI platform.
Three questions for Steve
What has your career looked like to date?
After completing my PhD in 2019, I interned at CSIRO working on applying machine learning to ranking medical documents. After the internship I joined Oracle and have been working on the Oracle Digital Assistant.
What do you do in your current position?
More specifically, my work involves improving one of our deep learning models behind the digital assistant. My daily tasks include:
- Model assessment: looking at the model’s performance on a test set, determining the exact model weaknesses and suggesting ways to improve it
- Data collection: writing annotation instructions and guidelines for our data vendors and contractors
- Data cleaning and validation: writing automatic scripts and manually checking to make sure our training data is of high quality.
I also spend time reading various research papers for ideas in improving/optimising the model.
How has your mathematics/statistics training been useful in your career?
Studying maths has given me problem solving skills that are valuable for my current work which basically involves looking deeply at a problem, understanding the root cause, and figuring out a solution. Moreover, a maths background has given me a strong basis in understanding the theories behind deep learning and all the related optimisation techniques which are always useful when debugging models or when trying to improve the model speed and performance.
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