In this event, we invite participants to discuss emergent technologies and the challenges of building successful businesses around them. Rewon will provide a brief overview of recent progress in deep learning, including an overview of his lab's Deep Speech 2 architecture, which was the first model to achieve human parity in a speech recognition task. Visit this link for a copy of this paper. He will then lead a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages startups face when scaling technology in comparison to larger tech companies. Sherwin will provide an overview of his experiences with biotech and the challenges and joys in scaling a team's product, culture and mission. We invite attendees to bring their own questions, insights, and experiences and join in a collaborative and warm conversation.

Rewon Child (PC 2013) is a researcher in Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab, where he focuses on improving the state of the art in speech recognition and language processing. He previously worked at the startup Enlitic, where he worked to apply deep learning algorithms to medical imaging. At Yale, he focused on applying computational methods and natural language processing to the study of politics and government, and spent several years doing research in Japan and China. In addition to his current work on speech recognition, he works on language learning applications using machine learning and serves as technical advisor for several startups.

Sherwin Yu (MC 2012) is a software engineer and entrepreneur, and currently works as engineering manager at Benchling, a biotech software start-up in San Francisco. After studying computer science and biochemistry at Yale, he has started and worked at a variety of start-ups, ranging from an energy tech company in Houston to an English education startup in Shanghai. Previously, he spent six months in Shanghai as part of Chinaccelerator, working on dailythem.es, a microblogging platform to help non-native English speakers improve their English writing. This first contact with the tech industry in China was a transformative experience for him, and led to his ongoing interest in the Chinese society and the emergent Chinese tech industry.

Event Details: When: Friday, February 24^th, 12:30-2:30pm Where: China Club, 12/F, The Old Bank of China Building, Bank Street, Central Cost: HK$350 for Yale Club members or HK$400 for non-Yale Club members and guests Pre-registration required.