Agenda:
6:30 - PM Pizza & Networking
7:00 - Announcements
7:05 - Anirudh Acharya - MXNet-R Lightning talk
7:20 - Tomas Nykodym - MLflow: Infrastructure for a Complete Machine Learning Life Cycle
7:45 - Javier Luraschi - Introduction to MLflow with R
8:10 - Norm Matloff - PolyanNA, a Novel, Prediction-Oriented R Package for Missing Values

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Anirudh Acharya
Introduction to the MXNet-R package

Apache(Incubating) MXNet(https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet) is a modern open-source deep learning framework used to train, & deploy deep neural networks. It is scalable & supports multiple programming languages including C++, Python, Julia, R, Scala, & Perl.

I will briefly introduce theMXNet-R package & run an example.

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Tomas Nykodym
MLflow: Infrastructure for a Complete Machine Learning Life Cycle

ML development brings many new complexities beyond the traditional software development lifecycle including evaluating multiple algorithms, & parameters, setting up reproducible workflows, & integrating distinct systems into production models.

In this talk, I will present MLflow, a new open source project from Databricks, that provides an open ML platform where organizations can use the ML libraries & development tools of their choice
to reliably build & share ML applications. MLflow introduces simple abstractions to package reproducible projects, track results, & encapsulate models that can be used with many existing tools,
accelerating the ML lifecycle for organizations of any size.

Tomas Nykodym is an ML/AI Platform Engineer at Databricks working on MLflow. He spent his last 6 years working on cutting edge distributed machine learning projects at H2O.ai & Databricks. His professional interests include distributed computing, applied math & machine learning.

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Javier Luraschi
Introduction to MLflow with R

This talk will teach you how to use MLflow from R to track model parameters & results, share models with non-R users & fine-tune models at scale. It will present the installation steps, common workflows & resources available for R. It will also demonstrate using MLflow tracking, projects & models directly from R as well as reusing R models in MLflow.

Javier is a Software Engineer in RStudio working in R packages, most notably, sparklyr, cloudml, r2d3 & mlflow.

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Norm Matloff
PolyanNA, a Novel, Prediction-Oriented R Package for Missing Values

Though there is a vast literature on techniques for handling missing
values, almost all of it is focused on estimation, rather than on
prediction. Here we present a novel approach developed specifically for
use in prediction applications, implemented in an R package, 'polyanNA'.
It can be used in both parametric & machine learning settings, & is
very fast computationally. (Joint work with Pete Mohanty.)