Title: Machine learning, AI, and career in the industry - insights through the eyes of a former astronomer

Abstract:
Machine learning, in particular deep learning, has transformed the tech industry in recent years. From photo editing to conversational agents, from identifying diseases to protein folding, energy saving to fusion plasma control, deep learning has played an increasingly important role in our lives. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to the backbones powering the state-of-art AI applications such as Smart Composition, Machine Translation, and Vision & Language Understanding, and then discuss the issues of AI and where it is headed in the future. I will share my journey from astrophysics to ML research at Google and now ML engineering at Waymo. I will then provide personal insights on the differences between different career paths (data scientist vs. ML engineer vs. software engineer), between big and small companies, and across multiple industries.