Derek Cheng
Software Engineer, Pinterest 

Derek Zhiyuan Cheng is software engineer on the Discovery team at Pinterest, where he builds large-scale machine learning models and features to improve Pinterest’s personalization recommendation systems. Previously, he worked at Google Research, where he helped improve personalized search and recommendation systems for Google Play, News, and Google Plus. Derek has authored over 20 peer-reviewed articles published in prestigious conferences and journals for applied machine learning, information retrie v a l, and data mining. He holds a PhD with a focus on geosocial data mining from Texas A&M University.

Sessions

11:05am–11:45am Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Escaping the forest, falling into the net: The winding path of Pinterest’s migration from GBDT to neural nets

Impact on business and society

Location: Imperial A

Level: Intermediate

Secondary topics:  Case studies, Deep learning

Xiaofang Chen (Pinterest), Derek Cheng (Pinterest)

Pinterest’s power is grounded in its personalization systems. Over the years, these recommender systems have evolved through different types of models. Xiaofang Chen and Derek Cheng explore Pinterest’s recent transition from a GBDT system to one based in neural networks powered by TensorFlow, covering the challenges and solutions to providing recommendations to over 160M monthly active users.