I had the opportunity to present a TEDx talk to an interested audience at a TEDxBigData event organized by J&J. Being part of the Data Sciences team at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, we constantly strive to identify novel opportunities to enable data-driven decisions throughout the pharmaceutical value chain, by designing and implementing machine learning models.

In this talk, I explained the technology behind Machine Learning by drawing a parallel to how little kids learn their mother tongue: by example. I further illustrated this with Josh Tenenbaum’s ‘Tufa’ example – allowing the audiene to recognize what is a tufa and what isn’t in less than a minute – even if they had never heard of the concept before.

I shared my enthousiasm and love for Natural Language Processing by giving some examples on the complexities and ambiguities in natural language, as well as showing some amazing examples of what NLP can do in concrete business cases today.

While I can’t share the recording of this talk online, it was an awesome opportunity to deliver a talk in TEDx style, talking to the audience directly instead of hiding behind slides.

My final closing remarks?

“The future is bright. And I want you to promise me something. The next time you think Siri, or Google Voice, or any other NLP toolkit, is being obnoxious, just give it a digital slap on the wrist and hope it will adapt itself and do a better job next time. Try not to get too annoyed or impatient … but instead think about the endless possibilities in which these technologies can make your life easier, acknowledge how well they are already doing on the difficult tasks we have set out for them, and prepare yourself for when they have fully matured. Because I promise you …. It will be mind blowing!“