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46:44 Minutes
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Breaking Down AI for IT Leaders: The No-Nonsense Guide
What is machine learning and, critically, what kinds of problems can it solve? It’s an important question, one that forms the fundamental basis of any AI initiative.
Here’s how the Google Cloud thinks about machine learning: It’s about logic, rather than just data.
Valliappa Lakshmanan, Big Data and Machine Learning, Google Cloud Platform, describes why such a framing is useful when it comes to devising new applications for ML and how to utilize it to expand the capabilities of your business.
From Lakshmanan perspective watching many companies in many industries leverage machine learning, he observes how abstraction levels of machine learning are increasing, how data comprehensiveness is becoming more important than data size and why systems can often build on top of preexisting models.
Lakshmanan also speaks about how your IT infrastructure has to change to enable you to take full advantage of machine learning and achieve tremendous business impact and personalization.
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38:32 Minutes
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Everything You Need to Know About Google Cloud ML Engine 101
Machine learning is all around us today. But data scientists and IT teams tasked with creating models have a hard time bringing together the right mix of ingredients—from data, infrastructure, tools, and APIs—to do their jobs effectively.
Google’s Cloud ML Engine eases many of the challenges data scientists and IT teams face. It’s a managed service that allows businesses to build and deploy their own models using any type or any size of data.
With Google’s Cloud ML Engine, data scientists can create models for training and prediction. And it provides APIs for these two building blocks.
Nikhil Kothari, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Cloud, breaks down Google’s Cloud ML Engine. He shows you how to use it as a service, so that data scientists can focus on data and on building models instead of managing infrastructure.
Making Mothers’ Day Special: How Google Cloud Migration for 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc Impacts CX
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2:30 Minutes
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Editor’s note: In honor of Mother’s Day, we look at how 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. migrated to Google Cloud as part of its digital transformation to quickly deploy seamless and convenient customer experiences across multiple brands on Mother’s Day and every day.
As a leading provider of gifts designed to help customers express, connect, and celebrate, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. has embraced cloud technologies to grow and transform its business through constant innovation. As part of our digital transformation, we recently completed the migration of our ecommerce platform and other services to Google Cloud. We’ve transitioned from a monolithic to a microservices platform, moved many workloads from our on-premises data centers to our Google Cloud environment, and scaled both horizontally and vertically.
Since our migration, we’ve developed efficient processes to launch new brands, improved the customer experience across all brands, and seen significantly increased site traffic.
Nurturing a more delightful customer journey
Customer delight is at the core of everything we do. Whether it be with a flower bouquet, a sweet treat, or a personalized keepsake, our mission is to deliver smiles. With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve all been challenged to find unique and safe ways to continue honoring the special connections in our lives and celebrating occasions with loved ones. Our customers have adapted by doing things such as sending gifts to isolated loved ones, sharing the same meal together virtually, or using video to engage with others through group activities like flower arranging and building charcuterie boards.
The customer experience is a top priority for us, and we constantly look for innovative ways to enhance the customer journey across our ecommerce platform of more than a dozen brands. As a result, we’ve continued to see a rise in demand as customers enjoy the ease and convenience of our site and discover our full family of brands.
Migrating to a cloud-first mindset
As we’ve continued to innovate and iterate on the customer experience, we knew we wanted to evolve our platform. We wanted to shift to a microservices platform, which would allow our team the opportunity to release updates to our site more often and set up the right continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.
Working with Google Cloud, we were able to move our ecommerce platform to the cloud and standardize our site and brand deployment by building one release that could then be repeated across all of our brands. We built everything in a modular fashion, including microservices and code libraries, so that sites could be easily constructed and replicated for each brand. And because of this, we were able to launch Shari’s Berries extremely quickly after we acquired the brand in 2019.
Moving our platform to a completely homegrown solution of microservices was a daunting task. But our team handled it beautifully through load-testing, stress-testing, and building new monitoring tools. And with Google Cloud supporting us all along the way, managing the migration process was simple and easy from start to finish.
Arranging a better bouquet of services
Currently, we’ve migrated every customer-facing touchpoint for all of our brands to Google Cloud—whether it’s on the web or mobile, our AI bots, or our chat interfaces.
- We run on Google Kubernetes Engine and Istio.
- We have nearly 200 microservices built to help power our entire ecommerce stack across several cloud services running on Google Cloud.
- We’re utilizing BigQuery for our offline intelligence.
Results are coming up roses
Our new stack on Google Cloud has benefits for both us and our customers. We moved from a session-based to a token-based system, which provides enhanced security as well as a consistent, convenient experience across all our brands. Using service workers and a single-page app, we are able to download all the relevant site content to the browser in under two seconds to create an instant-click experience for each and every customer. We also use Google Analytics to measure our user interactions and provide personalized results to each customer. Our hope is that with this new system, we can learn from customer behavior to offer gift givers a more personalized shopping experience during each visit.
The benefits of our new tech stack have not only helped us enhance the solutions we offer to customers today, they’ve also enabled us to offer new ones at lightning speed. With our legacy system, we used to release new code once a week or once a month. Now, even during our peak periods, we’re able to release 10 to 15 times a day and can deploy and pivot quickly to create new microservices and microsites on the fly—often without having to touch any code.
Efficiencies abound
The benefits of moving our platform to Google Cloud have extended to our internal teams as well. Before the migration, we had only two environments for developing and testing, which made it time-consuming to test updates before they went into production. Now with Google Cloud, we have several different journey teams—which are made up of developers, product owners, and technical owners—all working in several different environments, solving problems, and creating new solutions together.
Everyone is now empowered to be self-sufficient, developing and releasing microservices on their own when they’re ready. This has given our developers more time to take part in continued development and learning opportunities. For example, we offer lunch-and-learn sessions as well as other resources for everyone to take advantage of so they can continue to learn and refine their skills.
Planting the seeds for future growth
As we look to the future and think about how we help our customers express, connect, and celebrate, we’ll continue to collaborate across teams to deliver solutions that spread smiles. Specifically, we’re exploring additional use of AI to help us better serve our customers across all our brands.
We’ve enjoyed the ongoing support we’ve received from the Google Cloud team as they help us build new solutions and design a road map for the future. Their support has helped the 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. team to realize the power of the cloud and bring the very best experience to our customers.
Learn more about 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., or check out our recent blog about cloud migration for the real world.
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14:30 Minutes
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To make great products: do machine learning like the great engineer you are, not like the great machine learning expert you aren’t.
Most of the problems you will face are, in fact, engineering problems. Even with all the resources of a great machine learning expert, most of the gains come from great features, not great machine learning algorithms. So, the basic approach is:
- Make sure your pipeline is solid end to end.
- Start with a reasonable objective.
- Add common-sense features in a simple way.
- Make sure that your pipeline stays solid.
This approach will work well for a long period of time. Diverge from this approach only when there are no more simple tricks to get you any farther. Adding complexity slows future releases.
Once you’ve exhausted the simple tricks, cutting-edge machine learning might indeed be in your future. See the section on Phase III machine learning projects.
This document is arranged as follows:
- The first part should help you understand whether the time is right for building a machine learning system.
- The second part is about deploying your first pipeline.
- The third part is about launching and iterating while adding new features to your pipeline, how to evaluate models and training-serving skew.
- The final part is about what to do when you reach a plateau.
- Afterwards, there is a list of related work and an appendix with some background on the systems commonly used as examples in this document.
How Google Cloud’s Scalable Data Storage and High Compute Resources Fuel Investment Research
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1:30 Minutes
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Investment management is a heavily data-driven industry—portfolio managers and investment researchers require a large number of data sources to guide them in shaping their investment strategies.
New cloud capabilities and technologies enable investment managers to process data faster than ever before and iterate on ideas quickly to fuel innovation in the signal generation process and gain a competitive edge.
Using the cloud for investment research workflows makes it easier to onboard data from data providers, spin up large compute workloads in the midst of market volatility or during heavy research cycles, and manage complex machine learning or natural language workflows to gain market insights.
We hear from industry leaders that they’re exploring new ways to run investment research. “Differentiated investment strategies require new types of information sources, and new ways to process that information,” David Easthope, senior analyst, Market Structure and Technology, Greenwich Associates. “And that, of course, relies heavily on having access to reliable and scalable storage, computational, and AI / ML resources. More specifically, quantitative strategies can benefit from the computational platforms and embedded AI/ML capabilities the cloud can offer.”
Google Cloud gives investment managers essential components to work and operate faster as they bring their investment research workflows to the cloud. Here are the key highlights:
1. Simplify, speed up your data acquisition, discovery, and analytics
The foundation of any investment strategy starts with data—acquiring it, detecting patterns, and analyzing it for insights. Enabling data providers to easily share large datasets such as tick history within a high-performance analytics engine can greatly reduce the data engineering overhead when possible.
Once data is onboarded, you can tag business and technical metadata related to your datasets and provide portfolio managers the ability to discover these datasets via a search interface.
We further review analytics options for various scenarios, including aggregating massive datasets, creating dashboards, and incorporating streaming analytics workloads.
2. Take advantage of burst compute workloads
Data engineers and researchers require ready access to burst compute capabilities to perform backtesting, portfolio simulations and run risk calculations. Cloud works well for these workloads due to its elasticity, consumption-based models, and hardware evolution.
Many investment managers are shifting to a container-based strategy along with a Kubernetes-based scheduler for greater consistency, scaling and efficiency in environments with a large number of researchers. Cloud managed services and a rich suite of CI/CD tools can make this vision a reality while improving security and developer productivity.
3. Tackle machine learning (ML) and model deployment with the help from cloud
Quantitative researchers scour vast amounts of market and alternative data sources searching for signals and correlations, while ML engineers have the challenge of taking these signals and moving them to production.
Google Cloud empowers users to create and operationalize their models without wasting valuable time with a comprehensive set of MLOps tools.
In this paper, we explore multiple solutions for ML and model deployment. Those capabilities reduce the amount of time operationalizing ML models, so quants and data scientists have more time to devote to differentiating activities.
4. Get the data you need in less time with Natural Language and Document AI
Thousands of financial filings, news articles, and sell-side research reports are generated every day, and it’s difficult for humans alone to process this volume of information. These documents are often generated in many languages and the ability to do entity recognition, sentiment or syntactical analysis in those languages, or perhaps translate them into the language of the portfolio manager is of critical importance. Google Cloud provides these capabilities through pre-trained models, or allows you to train high-quality models with your own datasets.
Getting started
There are plenty of emerging technologies, tools, and approaches available to help investment managers today. At Google Cloud, we can help you access, organize, and utilize these essential components to make your research faster, reliable, and more valuable.
To learn more about these four keys to better investment research, check out our whitepaper for more.
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22:00 Minutes
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Deploying Real-time AI: A Walkthrough
Enterprises are increasingly looking to leverage streaming data (customer interactions, sales transactions, machine logs) for building new innovative features, increasing sales, and protecting against risks.
AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) technologies make it possible to amp up the detection of insights in large volumes of data: insights that otherwise would be impossible to gain with manual inspection.
Learn how Dataflow together with TensorFlow Extended (TFX) and Cloud AI are enabling the extraction of label and classification information from video clips and natural text, predicting probabilities and detecting anomalies, fraud, and patterns in streams of business data.
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