Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 4: AI in Retail with Saurabh Bhatnagar

Episode 4: AI in Retail with Saurabh Bhatnagar

Published: Oct. 8, 2018, 1:46 p.m.

Show Notes:

  • (3:20) Saurabh recalled his college experience.
  • (4:25) Saurabh talked about his first role out of school as a software engineer specializing in database at CA Technologies.
  • (8:06) Saurabh landed database consulting roles with different companies.
  • (9:14) Saurabh gave insights on the differences between database systems now and a decade ago.
  • (11:05) Saurabh shared his experience landing a senior data scientist job with Barnes & Noble.
  • (13:15) Saurabh explained major challenges in hiring good data scientists.
  • (16:10) Saurabh discussed his decision to go work for Rent The Runway.
  • (17:57) Saurabh gave insights on the data problems he had worked with at Rent The Runway.
  • (19:43) In reference to his blog post on scaling machine learning at RTR, Saurabh shared knowledge on structuring a data science team.
  • (21:36) Saurabh gave advice for data scientists to incorporate feedback loops into their workflow.
  • (26:00) Saurabh talked about how to give better pitches to business stakeholders.
  • (29:03) Saurabh showed great appreciation for Rent The Runway’s CEO and Founder, Jennifer Hyman.
  • (30:39) In his post Human in AI loop, Saurabh shared the details of building Deep Dress AI, which can show the Instagram photos on Rent The Runway’s product pages and help the customers find fashion inspiration through these high-quality shots.
  • (34:10) Saurabh talked about unique challenges of doing data science in the retail space.
  • (36:18) Saurabh gave a brief glimpse about his stealth-mode startup Virevol.
  • (36:58) Saurabh gave advice for data scientists who want to pursue the entrepreneurial route and start their own ventures.
  • (38:36) In a fun blog post, Saurabh used Generative Adversarial Network to generate dresses photos and use them as training data for the model. He discussed the potential usage of GAN models for fashion.
  • (41:02) Closing segments.

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