A community of eningeers, researchers, students, and enthusiasts working to advance the knowledge and application of machine learning science.

Chicago ML hosts meetups, workshops, and symposiums to support learners and experts alike. We are an all-volunteer organization and rely on contributions of time and resources from our members and sponsoring organizations. Membership is free and without obligation—simply follow the link below to sign up on our Meetup page.

Chicago ML fosters an open and welcoming environment to everyone regardless of age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.

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ML Engineering Workshop at IIT

Saturday, February 15, 2020 - 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM - Illinois Institude of Technology

Join us for a full day, hands on workshop at IIT on machine learning engineering!

ML engineering is the intersection of machine learning data science and software/systems engineering. It’s an emerging field that demands a broad and deep skillset in multiple domains.

In this workshop, we teach ML engineering basics and spend the remaining with hands-on, student-driven coding.

If you have an ML or data science project for school or work, you have the option of working on it during the workshop. Otherwise we have predefined exercises you can use.

Applied AI Workshop at IBM - Full Day

Monday, October 28, 2019 - 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM - IBM

Chicago ML is delighted to host with IBM a full day workshop on applied AI! Join us Monday, October 28 for a series of talks and interactive hands on learning. We are also hosting a one hour lightning talk session.

Lightning talk submission link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BZrZcQ08chTjVIWGS5Zn0ZHOm3-7dEwBK3HtlcvdOwk

Preliminary agenda:

9:00 AM - 9:30 AM - Registration and coffee
9:30 AM - 10:40 AM Intro to DL - hands-on workshop by Svetlana Levitan and David Nichols
10:40 AM - 11:20 AM Adversarial robustness 360 workshop by Svetlana Levitan
11:20 AM - 12:00 PM AI Fairness 360 workshop by David Nichols
12:00 PM - 12:30 PM Lunch
12:30 PM - 1:00 PM AI Explainability 360 workshop by Shatabdi Choudhury
1:00 PM - 1:30 PM IBM OpenScale by Greg Filla
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM Model deployment workshop by Svetlana Levitan
2:30 PM - 3:00 PM Break
3:00 PM - 3:30 PM Monte-Carlo Simulation for model understanding by Vladimir Shklover
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Watson services for NLP by David Bacarella
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM Lightning talks from attendees - submit your proposals!

IMPORTANT: You must provide your first and last names as they appear on a photo ID to be admitted to this event.

Chicago ML at Fermilab

Monday, June 03, 2019 - 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM - Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Chicago ML is extremely excited to announce our first meetup with the ML team at Fermilab - America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory!

NOTE: This event is in Batavia, IL - 40 miles west of Chicago. If you’d like to participate in a car pool - as a driver or a passenger - visit this link:

https://www.groupcarpool.com/t/h6bswk

We will be hearing from:

Gabe Perdue - Deep learning for ghost particles
Joao Calderia - Machine learning the universe
Javier Duarte - The fastest inference at the highest energies
Garrett Smith - Light weight workflow automation with Guild AI

Some of the group’s ML papers:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00743 https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.08332 https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10159 https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01106 https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.01483 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08986 https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06913 https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.02876

NOTE AGAIN: The meetup is at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois - approximately 40 miles west of Chicago. If you’d like to participate in a car pool - as a driver or a passenger - visit this link:

https://www.groupcarpool.com/t/h6bswk

Chicago ML hosted by IBM

Thursday, May 30, 2019 - 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM - IBM

Chicago ML is delighted to announce our first collaboration with IBM on May 30!

Open Standards for Machine Learning Model Deployment

by Svetlana Levitan

Dr. Svetlana Levitan, Developer Advocate with Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) at IBM, discuses open standards that have made the process of model deployment easier.

Predictive model deployment is the part of the machine learning process where the practical results are achieved, when the model is used for generating predictions on new data (known as scoring). The deployment used to present big difficulties, as models were typically built in one environment and needed to be deployed in a different one. Often they would need to be re-implemented in a new programming language, that would be very slow and error-prone.

Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) and Portable Format for Analytics (PFA) were developed by the Data Mining Group (DMG) that originated in Chicago. PMML has been around for more than 20 years and is used widely. PFA is an emerging standard that is getting a lot of interest. Open Neural Network eXchange (ONNX) format was recently developed by Facebook and Microsoft as a way to exchange deep learning (DL) models between different DL frameworks, and is now experiencing explosive growth. Attendees will get a good understanding of predictive model deployment challenges and approaches.

Svetlana Levitan, PhD, is Developer Advocate with Center for Open Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) at IBM. She has been a software engineer, architect, and technical lead for SPSS Analytic components for many years. She represents IBM at the Data Mining Group and is the release manager for PMML and PFA, open standards for predictive model deployment. She is also working with other companies on ONNX, an open model exchange format for deep learning models. Svetlana is a co-organizer of several Chicagoland Meetup groups, including Big Data Developers in Chicago, Chicago Cloud Developers, Open Source Analytics. She has authored several blogs and presented at many conferences and other events. Svetlana loves to learn new technologies and to share her expertise, to encourage girls and women in STEM.

Chicago ML hosted by ShopRunner

Thursday, May 23, 2019 - 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM - ShopRunner

Deciphering the Black Box: Understanding your Machine Learning Model

by Rajiv Shah

This talk will show how interpretability tools can give you not only more confidence in a model, but also help to improve model performance. This workshop will cover best practices for using techniques such as feature importance, partial dependence, and explanation approaches, such as LIME. Along the way, we will consider issues like spurious correlation, multicollinearity, and other issues that may affect model interpretation and performance. The talk will use easy to understand examples and references to open source algorithms to illustrate the techniques.

Rajiv Shah is a data scientist with DataRobot and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has previously worked as a data scientist for State Farm and Caterpillar. He is an active member of the data science community in Chicago. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.