Presentation: Probabilistic programming for software engineers

Big data — and the neural networks we use to make sense of it — have taken the industry by storm! But what might be falling through the cracks?

In this talk, I’ll introduce you to the world of Probabilistic Programming Languages, and why it’s something that the industry should care about today. Some of the most pressing problems in machine learning concern accuracy, interpretability, and reliability of our models, and PPLs, as they’re called, offer a compelling means to handle all of these at once. At the intersection of programming languages and machine learning, PPLs build upon centuries of Bayesian Statistics knowledge to offer predictions qualified with uncertainty estimates. But they also lean on techniques from the Programming Languages space to make this accessible to ordinary developers. And best of all, PPL models can be trained generically!

In addition to introducing you to PPLs and Bayesian Statistics, this talk will give a sneak preview of how we’re advancing probabilistic programming at Facebook, as well as some of the big problems we’ve used it to solve.