Editor's note: Maggie is a speaker for ODSC APAC 2021. Check out her talk, "How to Get Started With Deep Reinforcement Learning on a Variety of Use Cases?" there! I, like many others, first heard of reinforcement learning (RL) in the context of games. I watched a documentary about AlphaGo winning against Lee Sedol, the world Go champion, which, I must admit, made me shed a tear or two. However, when the opportunity emerged to try to apply RL in my work, a whole bunch of new questions flew into my mind.

ODSC APAC 2021 is right around the corner this September 15–16th, and while there's something for everyone, NLP is sticking out as one of the focal points of this conference. Natural language processing is indeed special in the APAC region, namely because there's a greater need for diverse datasets, due to the number of different languages spoken in the region. This has lead researchers to develop novel and exciting techniques to address these concerns. At ODSC APAC in a few weeks, you'll be able to hear from these data scientists about NLP, and hear from some research institutions that focus on NLP Natural language processing (NLP) has made truly impressive progress in recent years and is being deployed in an ever-increasing range of user-facing settings. Accompanied by this progress has been a growing realization of inequities in the performance of naively-trained NLP models for users of different demographics, with minorities typically experiencing lower performance levels.

Computers understanding human language is a fascinating area and has piqued interest since the 1950s. This could be because human expressions are very varied and possibly the advancement in algorithms has yet to catch up with the human evolution of language and its context. One key area where NLP is extensively used is eCommerce. Reviews are a significant part of online buying cycles today. Though the "vocal minority" is few, the number of users who are impacted by reviews is significantly large.

To help grow and strengthen the data science community, we are offering several ways to attend the leading applied data science virtual conference, ODSC APAC for free. Check out below how you can join us for talks by some of the leading experts in data science, AI, machine learning and more for free. At ODSC, diversity, inclusion, and democratization of data science are core values. At each conference we strive to create an inclusive experience, ensuring unrepresented groups feel welcome in the data science community. As part of this initiative, we are offering a limited amount of scholarship passes for free and discounted passes.