Fireside chat with Billy Okal

During this part of our fireside chat series, Billy Okal joins us to discuss how to handle issues arising when building real-world data-driven AI systems with a focus on how to deal with integration, data changes over time, taking in application-specific constraints.

Billy Okal is an engineer with expertise in robotics and machine learning. He currently leads the decision-making team at Voyage, developing autonomy for self-driving cars. He was previously at Apple Special Projects Group (SPG). He received bachelors in electrical engineering and computer Science and masters in computer science from Jacobs University in 2011 and 2013 respectively. During his PhD studies at the University of Freiburg, he developed algorithms for imparting high-level behavioural objectives on a robot's decision-making system as part of EU FP7's SPENCER project that developed a passenger guidance robot for airports. His current research interests include interactive and sequential learning, long-term autonomy, and applications in integrated systems. In the past, he visited and worked at various research labs including; the manipulation lab at CMU, Idiap Research Institute, TU Munich and the German research centre for AI (DFKI). He is actively involved in community programs including helping found the African robotics network, organizing and teaching at the Data science Africa (DSA) summer schools and organizing inaugural sessions on robotics and artificial intelligence at IEEE AFRICON 2011, 2013 conferences.