Engineering Practical Machine Learning Systems with Xavier Amatriain

Xavier Amatriain is a former machine learning researcher who went on to lead the recommender systems team at Netflix, and is now the vice president of engineering at Quora, the Q&A site. Xavier and I spend quite a bit of time digging into each of these experiences in the interview. Here are just a few of the things we cover in our discussion: Why Netflix invested $1 million in the Netflix Prize, but didn't use the winning solution; What goes into engineering practical machine learning systems; The problem Xavier has with the deep learning hype; And, what the heck is a multi-arm bandit and how can it help us.