Deliver personalized experiences and content like Xbox with Cognitive Services Personalizer (sponsored by Microsoft Azure)

Edward Jezierski (Microsoft), Jackie Nichols (Microsoft)

11:20am–12:00pm Thursday, September 26, 2019

Location: 1A 03

Sponsored

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Personalizing content is a complex, dynamic problem where labor-intensive machine learning workflows and costly A/B testing fail to catch up to the nuances of user behavior. How do the pros, like Xbox One, approach this? The Cognitive Services Personalizer (now in public preview) makes use of reinforcement learning at enterprise scale. It enables a full learning loop that runs at digital speed, optimizing for your business goal by reacting to real-time user feedback.

Edward Jezierski and Jackie Nichols demonstrate how Cognitive Services Personalizer works with your content and data, how it autonomously learns to make optimal decisions, how you can add it to your app with two lines of code, and what’s under the hood. Then they share the results Personalizer achieved on the Xbox One home page as well as best practices for applying it in your applications today. Join in to learn how your business can use the new Cognitive Services Personalizer to improve business outcomes and user experience by letting AI learn directly from user’s behavior.

This session is sponsored by Microsoft.

What you'll learn

Explore Cognitive Services Personalizer and learn how to use it

Edward Jezierski

Microsoft

Edward Jezierski is a PM at Microsoft bringing reinforcement learning services to market. He works across all Microsoft divisions with the goal of making the power of RL-based AI available to everyone. Previously, he was CEO and CTO at InSTEDD, a Google.org spin-off nonprofit building technologies used in disaster response, public health, and global development; helped start patterns & practices, a group at Microsoft that pioneered open source and Agile product development at Microsoft; and researched model design and robot control with deep neural networks and evolutionary systems.

Jackie Nichols

Microsoft

Jackie Nichols is a member of the applied innovation and incubation team within Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial Organization, where she’s responsible for partnering with Microsoft internal Product Groups (PG) and developing longstanding and trusted relationships by providing a rare combination of both senior business experience and the deep technical capabilities necessary to provide the critical interface between early adopters, the field, and the PG. Her responsibilities include business alignment and strategy, customer executive relationship and customer deliveries, quality improvement activities through amplifying real-world customer and partner experiences and feedback to the PG, cross-domain expertise, recruiting and driving key partner relationships, and educating the Microsoft field, as well as creating and contributing to PG IP. Jackie is involved in business and technical risk management as well as the entire implementation lifecycle with customers, with a broad focus on consistent delivery, innovation, and technology alignment. She’s currently partnering with the Azure Cognitive Personalizer Service PG to transform how customers think about and perform personalization of their content through machine learning. Previously, Jackie was the CTO for modern productivity at Microsoft Services, where she led a team of Microsoft’s most-senior solution, regional, and industry architects and was responsible for developing strategies to align Microsoft Services delivery capabilities and business goals with Microsoft product and industry trends, provide pre-sales architecture leadership, readiness, IP, delivery quality oversight, in addition to driving diversity and inclusion. She holds a degree in computer science from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Jackie believes in giving back and spends her spare time working with local charities as well as more globally focused organizations that concentrate on world-view issues.