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System Thinking in Productionizing ML

9 minute read

Published:

Over the past year, I have been actively advocating for the use of system thinking in the design and development of industrial ML systems. This blog post serves as a documentation of my thought processes.

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About my hobbies

The photo below is me and my wife hiking at the Glacier National Park. We have done many hiking, offroading, and other outdoor activities across the U.S. Among the many destinations, Utah, Montana, and Alaska are my favoriate destinations so far. My wife find Big Island most attractive, I can’t argue with her because I also enjoy the snorkeling expeirence and the resorts.

An amateur in photography, a beginner in AI arts

Photography isn’t exactly my hobbie – I engage in it to add an extra elemet of joy to my outdoors activities, and give my wife some motivations to join me. An ‘amateur photograher’ is is how I title myself when explaining to other hikers why I carry the expensive gears on the trail. However, one thing that I am always hesitant to disclose to others is that I earn a living through machine learning …

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Tutorial on Theoretical Foundation for Recommender Systems

Industrial tutorial, Walmart Labs, 2022

In the past several years, I spent most of my time productionizing recommender systems and researching the various gaps between what we observe in practice and what existing theory tells. Modern recommender system, in my experience, has evolved a long way from the initial Netflix challenge and collaborative filtering approaches. The same story happens for Information Retrieval (IR) as well, though it seems the boudary between IR and Recsys is gradually fading these days – many shared ideas and solutions are binding these two fields, and I believe this trend will continue in the future. In general, the most exciting advancement in the past decade has to do with deep learning (DL), and in one way or another, Recsys seems to be adopting it more than IR. Please don’t get me wrong, embracing DL does not mean significant progress has been made in the field, to me it just means more questions and challenges ahead. (Not finished…)