Toronto, ON (Feb. 14, 2019) – Dessa recently launched a program for employees to dedicate a portion of working hours to personal projects that would help the company advance its machine learning knowledge.
Combining their interest in space with an exploration of deep learning’s potential applications for astronomy, three of Dessa’s engineers have collaborated on a project called space2vec since summer 2017. Recently, the team built a deep learning system that identifies supernovas from telescope images with record-breaking speed, cutting the time it would take astronomers to identify supernovas almost in half!
Read the team’s personal account of how they did it:
“Clustering the goddamn universe.”
It was summer 2017 when Cole, one of our Machine Learning Engineers, first started flying these words around the Dessa office. The team was discussing dream projects to work on within the field of deep learning, and a quick survey of the room confirmed our initial suspicions… to work on something space-related would be pretty freaking awesome!
Luckily, we found ourselves in the right place at the right time. The company had recently started a program for employees to dedicate a portion of working hours to personal projects that would help us advance our machine learning knowledge.
We knew this program would help advance our product, too. At Dessa, two-thirds of the space2vec team (Jinnah and Pippin) spend the majority of work-time building features for Foundations, a platform for engineering enterprise-grade AI solutions. In order to build tools for ML engineers that they actually want to use, it’s essential for us to understand how they work and what problems they face from end to end. While the frequent exchange of feedback between our machine learning and software engineering teams is extremely useful, one of the best ways to build empathy into the product is to tackle a machine learning project hands on. Working on space2vec offered us an amazing way to get there, while also giving us the opportunity to grow our knowledge of space.
Read more about their journey into space and their contribution to astronomy.
The space2vec team applied advanced machine learning techniques to tackle problems in astronomy (L-R: Jinnah Ali-Clarke, Pippin Lee & Cole Clifford)
Dessa is a proud sponsor of the 17th annual Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference (ICTC2019) and will present on two Emerging Technology topics. Learn more about taking advantage of advanced tech in your insurance business:
- “Getting A.I. Right The First Time”
- Stephen Piron, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Dessa
- “AI Innovation Case Study: Symbility and Dessa”
- Paul Crowe, CEO, Symbility Intersect; CMO, Symbility Solutions
- Stephen Piron, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Dessa
With an agile approach to business, new technology, culture, and more, Dessa exemplifies the ‘organization of today.’
About Dessa
Dessa is helping enterprises reinvent what’s possible for business with AI. Based in Toronto, the company works with enterprise leaders to collaboratively build and deploy customized AI systems designed to drive business value. Dessa’s expertise in applied AI is bolstered by partnerships with industry leaders including NVIDIA, the Vector Institute, and Amazon Web Services. In 2017, Dessa was named AI Company of the Year and received $9 million in Series A funding. Dessa was formerly known as DeepLearni.ng (until June 2018).
Source: Dessa
