Christian D. Blakely

Head of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence @ PwC Switzerland

Christian started his career at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington DC as an atmospheric physicist. After completing a Ph.D. in Computational Science at University of Maryland, he had a 3 year long deep dive into big data and machine learning while doing a post-doctoral fellowship with the United States Department of Commerce. He moved to Switzerland to pursue a career in Europe, and now leads the machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts for PwC Switzerland, focusing on real-time machine learning technologies. He is also a part time classical concert pianist.

Real-time Preludes and Etudes: How to Play the Piano Using Only your Mind

Real-time learning and prediction (RTLP) is a branch of machine learning that attempts to learn signals, classifications, structure, and/or information from streaming data one sample at a time. RTLP pipelines require at least three things: 1) a streaming data source, 2) a model parsing the data source into features from which it will learn one observation at a time, and 3) some type of output signal. In this talk, we will demonstrate RTLP where the model will be a novel sparse hierarchical prediction architecture, the streaming data will be EEG signals from the brain, and the output will be music being composed in real-time. Interactive performances at the piano will be given that will attempt to show how RTLP can adapt in many ways and go beyond the limits of standard machine learning.