Anthill Inside 2019

We have developed a human-in-the loop system, AgentBuddy that is helping Intuit improve the quality of search it offers to internal Customer Care Agents (CCAs). AgentBuddy aims to reduce the cognitive effort on part of the CCAs while at the same time boosting the quality of our legacy federated search system. It addresses two key pain points 1)Given several candidate query answering mechanisms, how to select the right mechanism given a question and 2)Having retrieved a set of lengthy documents how to help the agent zoom in on the content most important for the question at hand. We address #1 using an elegant approach for principled exploration based on bandit algorithms and for #2 we have several models based on supervised and unsupervised learning. We will share several lessons from a practical perspective in working with business teams especially around determining the right metrics and coming up with a validation process acceptable to business. Since this is a real world working system deployed on AWS, we will also discuss practical challenges in scaling and how we overcame them.

Outline

Business Problem
Approach
Formulation
ML algorithms used : a)Bandit algorithma and b)Algorithms for highlighting
Architectural challenges
Scaling up
Latency issues and sane fall-backs
Validation
Ground truth labels
Merics and measurement
Business Impact
Takeaways for Data Science practice

Speaker bio

Hrishi has been a regular speaker at Anthill and delivered a full-length session on “Building and driving adoption for a robust semantic search system” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKXwqcTpao&t=650s&list=PL279M8GbNset5FCdcLd_ovckHE14PkIhM&index=3
He’s a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Intuit working on problems in NLP and ML applied to Information Retrieval.
Hrishi did his Master’s from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore in 2005 where he worked on Computer Vision for studying atomization in Cryogenic Rocket Engines. Post that he did a full-time PGDM from IIM-Kozhikode. He has been working in the ML/Analytics space for over 12 years and has had long stints at Amazon Core ML and at Mu Sigma before joining Intuit’s IAT team.
Aside of work he spends time playing with his 5-year-old daughter and in solving puzzles.

Slides

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/18V9AqJb4nQpfTBNB3w1y8qrHWtXs4Nbk