MetaDAMA - Data Management in the Nordics

2#13 - Xiaopeng Li - The Path to MLOps (Eng)

Winfried Etzel VP Activities DAMA Norway Season 2 Episode 13

«MLOps is a set of practices that bring people, process and platform together into a stream-aligned process to manage End-2-End Machine Learning lifecycles.»

MLOps is taken about a lot, so I asked an expert what we are actually talking about. Xiaopeng Li is AI business lead at Microsoft for the Western European market, located in Oslo. Xiaopeng is a passionate influencer in the field of Data and AI/ML, who was nominated as AI influencer of the Year at last years DAIR-awards in Stockholm.

Here are my key takeaways:

Patterns in AI adoption

  • AI adoption projects are quite diverse, but with some patterns that are visible across. Here are use-cases that a lot of industries are working with:
    • Business Process Automation as an AI use case 
    • Adopting AI to process documents automatically and extract key-values
    • Natural Language understanding and processing, but also Natural Language generation
    • Chat GPT
    • Knowledge Mining
    • Unstructured data analysis

«Nordic countries are at the forefront when it comes to adopting AI and ML»

  • Some of the most advanced search capabilities used in Microsoft are developed in Norway
  • Nordic countries are typically quite tach-savvy
  • Nordic countries have very good infrastructure

What is MLOps?

  • MLOps is about agility, productivity, consistency and quality
  • It is about creating scalability for your Data Science work
  • MLOPs is a vage concept and you can probably find a variety of different definitions. Is MLOps at the intersection between DevOps, ML and Software Engineering?
  • Scale ML development and deployment with constancy, with quality, with speed

The three elements that are most important are people, process and platform

  • People:
    • 5 particularly important roles: Stakeholder, Cloud Infrastructure Architect, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer
    • There are many different roles involved in MLOps, from cleaning data to testing a model an implementing it. These roles need to be orchestrated
    • Domain experts and stakeholders play a critical role in defining the challenge in the first place. They can formulate what to achieve and what is good enough
    • Change Management is important, especially if your ML implementation triggers behavioral change
  • Platform:
    • You are in need of a secure, scalable infrastructure to would your models on
    • Mature organizations who do ML at scale, have most an integrated architecture for Data Management, Analytics and Machine Learning
  • Process:
    • Data collection,. Data processing and data management are processes you need to focus on in MLOps
    • You need a process and the right competencies to gather use-cases in the first place
    • Build a backlog of initiatives and then go through prioritization based on eg. Data availability, feasibility of solution given current etch-landscape, value for business, cost, time to marked,..

Path to MLOps

  • Always start with assessing your current landscape and maturity
  • Start by assessing your platform capabilities
  • Ensure you have the right competencies and people
  • If you want to operationalize MLOps, don’t look at it as a technological problem, but something that includes the entire organization
  • Key is to bring key stakeholders as early as possible into the discussion

Oslo AI:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/oslo-ai/

https://www.meetup.com/oslo-ai/

Link to MS learning:

MLOps Maturity Model

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