"Graphs have become very powerful, they're fundamental, and they're only becoming more and more important," said Dr. Steven Skiena, Director of the AI Institute at Stony Brook University. Graphs are a fundamental part of computer science, and they are only getting larger. Analyzing graphs using machine learning is powerful but requires translating them into numerical values. That's where graph algorithms come in. In this week's five-minute interview (conducted at GraphConnect 2018 in NYC), we spoke with Dr. Steven Skiena, author of The Algorithm Design Manual and The Data Science Design Manual, about his work on DeepWalk, slated to be incorporated into the Neo4j graph algorithm library.

"Most people are not yet looking at graph databases from a machine-learning point of view. All the inherent knowledge we as humans use to make decisions can be encoded in a graph structure," said Ajinkya Kale, Senior Applied Researcher at eBay's New Product Development Group. As a Senior Applied Researcher at eBay's New Product Development Group, Ajinkya and his team use Natural Language Understanding to bake machine learning into the graph database that drives eBay's virtual shopping assistant, eBay ShopBot. In this week's five-minute interview (conducted at GraphConnect New York), Ajinkya tells us how he got started with Neo4j and about his vision for machine learning on knowledge graphs. Talk to us about how you guys use Neo4j at eBay.

Keywords: 5-minute interview apple cypher express.js Bryce Merkl Sasaki is the Community Content Manager for Neo Technology. He studied professional and creative writing for undergrad and has been freelancing for 7 years. Recently, he worked at an inbound marketing agency in Philadelphia as a copywriter before moving to California. When not working, he likes to spend his time working on his novel, looking for pickup soccer games and reading voraciously.