Amelia & Filip — How Pandora Deploys ML Models into Production

Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production.

---

Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners.

Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a PhD student working on deep neural networks for acoustic and language modeling applied to musical audio recordings.

Connect with Amelia and Filip:

📍 Amelia's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-nybakke-60bba5107/

📍 Filip's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-korzeniowski-28b33815a/

---

⏳ Timestamps:

0:00 Sneak peek, intro

0:42 What type of ML models are at Pandora?

3:39 What makes two songs similar or not similar?

7:33 Improving models and A/B testing

8:52 Chaining, retraining, versioning, and tracking models

13:29 Useful development tools

15:10 Debugging models

18:28 Communicating progress

20:33 Tuning and improving models

23:08 How Pandora puts models into production

29:45 Bias in ML models

36:01 Repetition vs novelty in recommended songs

38:01 The bottlenecks of deployment

🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-amelia-and-filip 🌟

Links:

📍 Amelia's "Women's History Month" playlist: https://www.pandora.com/playlist/PL:1407374934299927:100514833

---

Get our podcast on these platforms:

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​

👉 YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​

👉 Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​

Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:

http://wandb.me/slack​​

Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:

https://wandb.ai/fully-connected