Industry Talk: Pivoting - or how we managed to make money with research outputs

26 Jul 2019 2:10 PM - 3:00 PM
Presenter/Speaker: Peter Reutemann, Senior Research Programmer, Applied Machine Learning Group, Computer Science Department, University of Waikato
Location: G.1.15

The ADAMS workflow system was never planned, but merely a by-product of a research project. Though the research project never saw the light of day, other projects built on top of it were commercially successful and turned ADAMS into a modular open-source Java framework. Being able to quickly create and deploy machine learning applications (no coding required!) was the key to success in bringing predictive models for spectral and image data to the agricultural sector.

BIO
After a stint in industry, co-developing an ERP system for bookshops and small publishers in Pascal/Delphi, an undergraduate thesis piqued Peter's interest in machine learning, therefore pursuing a masters degree at Freiburg University and writing his thesis on propositionalization here at Waikato University using Java. After graduating and several Java-based research projects at Waikato later (semi-supervised learning, gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry data processing), research funding for computer science in NZ dried up and shifted the focus to commercial applications of machine learning, moving closer to industry again.