Dr. Lei Tang & Dr. Xin Xu will talk about how they apply machine learning with small data sets in sales management & forecast.

The recent successes of machine learning & deep learning can be largely attributed to three factors: emergence of abundant data, development of innovative algorithms, & availability of machine learning tools & computing resources. Unfortunately, not all application spaces provide data sets large enough to be used in the usual or obvious ways. In this talk, Lei & Xin will focus on one specific domain, enterprise sales, where data is often limited in volume, always noisy, & constantly evolving. They will describe how machine learning, & in particular deep learning, can help, & how we address the data challenges described. They will specifically discuss how we select model architectures appropriate for these limited data situations, for example, how deep our networks should be. By sifting through sales records & associated sales activities Lei & Xin enable identification of at-risk opportunities as well as project & estimated the time required to close each deal. This, in turn, contributes to the generation of a reliable business forecast for sales managers & executives. Lessons & findings learned through the process will be shared.

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Lei Tang is the Chief Data Scientist at Clari, a startup backed by Sequoia Capital & Bain Capital ventures, focusing on predictive analytics for sales execution & forecasting. Lei received his Ph.D. in computer science from Arizona State University in 2010, & B.S. from Fudan University, China. He is passionate about reshaping variety of businesses, driving business growth & decision through data science & machine learning. From[masked], Lei was the lead data scientist at Demand Generation of @WalmartLabs, where he worked closely with marketing team to drive traffic to site, impacting hundreds of revenue each year. Before that, Lei had 2-year stint at advertising sciences in Yahoo! Labs, working on targeting, user profiling/segmentation by mining user behavioral, social & content information. Lei has co-authored one book on community detection & mining in social media (top-download in the corresponding data mining lecture series), held 4 patents, published over 30 papers at top-notch conferences & journals on data mining/machine learning, with over 4000 citations.

Dr. Xin Xu is currently working as a data scientist in Clari. Before this, She received her Ph.D degree in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2015. She also did summer intern in Bell Labs & Akamai Technology in 2014 & 2015 respectively. Her current research interest mainly focuses on applying data mining, machine learning & advanced analytics to solve practical problems in sales domain.

Our venue:Clari1154 Sonora Court, Sunnyvale, CA 94086

Parking Instructions:If you drive in, you can park in the parking lot alongside our building in any open spot. If the lot is full, there is also parking along the street that is available. We are also conveniently located just 5-mins walk away from the Lawrence CalTrain station.

Event schedule:

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM: Food & Sign in

7:00 PM - 8:00 PM: Talk followed by Q&A

8:00 PM - 9:00 PM: Social Hour: Pizza & Networking

9:00 PM Event close [please note that we need to be cleared out of the sight by this time.]