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Title:

Research at Snapchat: How long-term investments in innovation can help companies succeed

Abstract:

Research in Industry: How long-term investments in innovation can help companies succeed

The technological landscape is evolving at an unprecedented speed. Innovation became mandatory for companies to stay relevant. In this talk, we will discuss examples of how investment in long-term research can be beneficial, examine the challenges of managing a research team in an industry lab, and share experiences of methods that balance the short and long-term gains from doing research.

Biography:

Leonardo started working with Machine Learning in 2011 as an undergraduate researcher at UFRJ. He has worked at Pivotal Software, Intel, Yelp, and is now a Lead Research Engineer at Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat, Bitmoji, and Spectacles. He has recently joined UCLA Extension as an Instructor for the Machine Learning with R class.

He manages the Computational Social Science team at Snap Research, working on understanding behavior to improve Snap's products. He is involved in problems that require an understanding of Data Mining, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Graph Mining, Behavioral Science, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Processing. His team works on long-term projects that require scientific research. He has published several scientific papers in top conferences, including ACL, ICASSP, NAACL, WWW, and ICLR.

Leonardo holds a Masters in Intelligent Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor's in Computer and Information Engineering from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ - Rio de Janeiro's Federal University). During his time at UFRJ, he received a merit-based scholarship to attend Cornell University, where he studied Computer Science.