Abstract: 

Data Science plays an increasingly important role within Square. This talk will provide an overview of our approach to Data Science, Machine Learning, and Automation and discuss a wide range of specific applications, including behavioral analysis for fraud detection, deep learning models for Customer Support, distributional semantics for Caviar's menu recommendations, and classifier ensembles that discover opportunities for Capital loans. Hear how Data Science is being applied to help create a more inclusive financial system!

Bio: 

Marsal Gavalda is a senior R&D executive with deep expertise in speech, language, and machine learning technologies. Marsal currently leads the Commerce Platform Machine Learning team at Square, where he applies machine learning for economic empowerment and financial inclusion. Previously, Marsal headed the Machine Intelligence team at Yik Yak, where he developed natural language processing and machine learning services to analyze the content of messages, discover trends, and make recommendations at scale and across languages. Prior to that, Marsal served as the Director of Research at MindMeld (acquired by Cisco), where he applied the latest advances in speech recognition, language understanding, information retrieval, and machine learning to the MindMeld conversational and anticipatory computing platform. Marsal has also extensive experience in the customer interaction and speech analytics space, as he has served as VP and Chief of Research at Verint Systems and as VP of Research and Incubation at Nexidia (acquired by NICE), where he developed disruptive speech analytics solutions for the call center, intelligence, and media markets. Marsal holds a PhD in Language Technologies and a MS in Computational Linguistics, both from Carnegie Mellon University, and a BS in Computer Science from BarcelonaTech. Marsal is the author of over thirty technical and literary publications, thirteen issued patents, and is fluent in six languages. He is also a frequent speaker at academic and industry conferences and organizes, every summer, a science and humanities summit in Barcelona on topics as diverse as machine translation, music, or the neuroscience of free will.