Cognitive Assistants, Recruiter Chatbots and AI @Wholi, from Bucharest, Romania
Notes from the Bucharest.AI Meetup 5.0
👌Super thank yous to our friends @TechHubBucharest that were so great in supporting us with the venue and happy thoughts. Chapeau, guys!
Powerful things happen when like-minded people connect.
This edition we focused on:
- Challenges from our local community, as part of our Community Open Space. Featured: Brainext, the workplace cognitive assistant by Cristian Aurelian Petroaca;
- What’s happening in the world, event alert Launch Festival in Berlin by Kalina Lukanova & Pedro Saraiva;
- Demo: Applyr, how chatbots improve the candidate experience by Stephen Parkins, CEO;
- Keynote: AI @Wholi — People and company search. Focus > extracting features and relationships from texts relevant for people search & matching different online profiles of a person/company by Traian Rebedea, PhD & ML Scientist.
Challenges — Brainext, the workplace cognitive assistant
Wanna join the Open Space Challenges? Fill in this form and claim your spot.
Our presenter, at this edition, was Cristian Aurelian Petroaca. Cristian is a 10+ yrs experienced developer active in the networking business. He is a Committer at Apache Stanbol — a tool for semantic content management. As well as a beginner in Machine Learning and NLP, although very passionate about.
Cristian is looking for partners in helping him out with his challenges. 👆Click for slides deck.
Cristian’s current challenges are:
- Explore and develop strong business case around the broad examples given
- Explore the technical challenges to make the business case possible
- Explore the technical challenges even if there is no business case
Have a thought for helping out? Why not ping him directly or drop us a note for an intro to him.
What’s happening in the world — Launch Festival Berlin, March 2018
The tech conference made by developers for developers.:) Wanna access or learn more about their Top Talent Grant?
👆Click for slides deck or ping us directly.
Demo: Applyr, how chatbots improve the candidate experience
Applyr Recruiter Chatbots are a customisable and scalable solution to recruitment overload. Applyr brings the power of Artificial Intelligence to the top of the recruitment funnel. It selects the most qualified candidates within the applicant haystack, based on the criteria that the recruiter defines, and aims to provide the most human recruitment experience.
Applyr was demo-ed by its CEO, Steve Parkins. Steve’s background looks like this: Steve is a former derivatives trader turned tech entrepreneur, originally from England, grew up in France, lived and worked in Germany, Switzerland and Holland. He started working on Applyr, in Amsterdam, with his founding partners in early 2017.
Given we had Steve over a remote connection, we saved a couple of Q&As for this debrief piece here, and it goes:
Q:How much of the recruiting process are you covering with Applyr?
A (Steve): When the candidate clicks ‘Apply’ on the company’s careers site, the Applyr chatbot conversation begins and covers the very first stage of the selection process (pre-selection). By asking tailored questions, the chatbot verifies whether the candidate meets the core requirements for the role (e.g. minimum experience, work visa, certification etc). It also scores the candidate based on secondary requirements. This means for the recruiter that instead of reading 1000 applications, he or she can focus on the top-scoring 20 or 30 candidates. The recruiter can then decide who they want to interview, from a much smaller pool of *qualified* candidates. The Applyr chatbot also takes care of scheduling the interviews, eliminating email ping-pong for the recruiter.
Q: How many clients do you have?
A (Steve): We have limited our pilot programme to 10 clients for now, based on our existing resources. Considerably more clients have expressed a strong interest in working with Applyr, once our full version is live next year.
Q: What are the industries your clients come from?
A (Steve): Our customers range from startups, to mid-size recruitment agencies, to Fortune 500 corporations. They also cover a wide range of industries: retail, transportation, IT, heavy industry, services.
Q: As a startup (doing an AI-based product), based on your experience until now, what is the key factor that contributed to your success?
A (Steve): It’s still too early to speak of success! But one thing that we believe is working well: Walk before you can run. We prefer to have a working chatbot solution that can already deliver value, in a way that’s relatively simple to explain and bring to market (using decision trees, scoring and scheduling).
We will add more complex AI technologies, such as NLP and Machine Learning, later (i.e. in 2018–2019). If you’re a startup and you decide to build a rocket ship from the start, most likely you will run out of resources before you can release an MVP. In any case, you need to collect extensive real-world data before you can do Machine Learning and that’s what we’re doing.
Q: Can Applyr be implemented to work with languages that the major platforms do not support yet (e.g.: Romanian)?
A (Steve): Yes, this is one of our key differentiators! We can build chatbots in just about any language using a Latin script, so long as we have someone in-house who is able to generate content in that language.
This doesn’t include Romanian yet, but besides English we’ve already built Applyr chatbots in French, German, Spanish and Dutch. In fact we also build chatbots that switch language mid-conversation. This is particularly useful in assessing candidates for a role where multiple languages are required.
Keynote: AI @Wholi — People and company search
The talk introduced Wholi (https://wholi.com/) and highlighted several applied AI/ML components within the products developed for people and company search.
Traian Rebedea — Passionate of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and algorithms, with solid experience as a ML scientist both in companies and academia. Teaching & mentoring to transmit some of his passion and interest to others.
Topics covered:
- Extracting features and relationships from texts relevant for people search.
- Matching different online profiles of a person/company
Who attended Bucharest AI 5.0?
You did?:) We’d love to get to know more of your interests over a sip of coffee or tea.
Curious to find more about us? Read on about what we stand for.
What we stand for? Enabling People to Apply Artificial Intelligence.
We talk AI, but we mean for a healthy, fulfilling environment where you can identify, discover and refine strategic assets and educate yourself towards a cohesive team approach that doesn’t allow hubris to get in their way. All these as a basis for understanding, igniting and refining transformative ideas, products and services in the applied Artificial Intelligence sphere. You can reach out or join us to: discover the applied AI in Bucharest and get a curated global status of AI use cases, discover startups, connect to AI practitioners, enthusiasts and investors, share lessons learned, or learn and stay informed about AI’s progress. We’ll always try to offer the best of the scene and we believe in a diverse range of skills to bring expertise, thoughts, and ideas to the table to build a strong AI community.
Why? AI is and will be changing us, our lives, companies and the world. I and team Bucharest AI & City AI are honoured and very excited to build, grow and be part of an elite community, to drive, explore and help implement the most mindful set ups of successful AI across the board.
James Cash puts it: “Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.” Join us and let’s start applying AI mindfully.
What’s our mission?
We are strong adopters of the Kaizen way, which is one of the core concepts of any Lean approach as well. That means, we are going to continuously strive to change for the better and build it up, iteration by iteration. Having you around and helping us build it together is what we care the most for. It’s all about people and how we can work together to achieve more, to stand up together and figure out challenges and take learnings. Let’s discover together, what’s the most opportune and best AI solution for our ideas, products, services, businesses, problems.
As we mature and get past the stage of just launching the Bucharest AI community, we’re working on our roadmap for 2018. Stay tuned and can’t wait to share with you the new partnerships, great topic line-ups and applied AI use cases. We promise to build Bucharest AI as the birthplace of innovation, creativity, igniters and change.
Want to find out the latest updates in the applied AI scene, get to know the local challenges in this field from entrepreneurs, private sector, civil society, academia and influencers, or seek support and ideas for your challenges from the community? Then Bucharest.AI is the place to be in 2018.
📥 Feedback keeps things going
Have your say about Meetup 5.0.
Collected feedback, to date, shows you are interested in finding more about how can we bring an AI methodology or mindset to a business, product or service, the “business approach of AI”. Help us find more of the exact learnings you want to explore and we promise we’ll start a Business Approach to AI Series soon.
In the meantime, here’s a lovely collection of 59 predictions for 2018.
Good businesses keep up with the hottest trends. Great ones anticipate them.
🎄 Merry Festive Season from all of us @BucharestAI. May you spend a grateful and joyful Season and prepare your resolutions for 2018.:) We. Are. Groot.
‘Till the next year!;) ✌️
