Speaker: Andreas Gros

Data Scientist @Facebook

I am a scientist with a background in complex systems on Facebook’s spatial computing team. I work on the High-Resolution Settlement Layer and connectivity crisis data. I also work on spatial demographic questions. For my PhD I studied the evolution of dispersal strategies at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. I expanded the work on spatial co-evolutionary systems as a postdoc at the New England Complex Systems Institute, where I also worked on spatial socio-economic systems, like ethnic violence. I received my diploma (equivalent to MS) in applied systems analysis at the Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Osnabrueck, Germany.

Find Andreas Gros at

Talk : Building Data Products for Social Good

Track : Papers in Production: Modern CS in the Real World
Location : Cyril Magnin III
Day of week : Tuesday
Duration : 4:20pm - 5:00pm

Facebook partners with humanitarian and academic organizations, as well as community-driven projects, like OpenStreetMap, on a number of Data for Good efforts. Examples of the outputs are

  • the High-Resolution Settlement Layer, for which we identify the locations of human-built structures from high-resolution satellite images and add population data to it in collaboration with Columbia University,
  • our Disaster Maps, which contain aggregated, anonymized information about the availability of network coverage and power availability, as well as human mobility in the context of natural disasters,
  • our large-scale input into OpenStreetMap, for which we detect roads from high-resolution satellite images, prepare them for human review, and feed the results into OpenStreetMap

We will present details about the methods, challenges, and community feedback involved in producing these datasets, as well as the impact they've each had over the last two years.

Other talks from track Papers in Production: Modern CS in the Real World

Building Data Products for Social Good
Data Scientist @Facebook
Shankar Iyer
FAIR : Advances in Speech at Facebook
Research Engineering Manager @Facebook
Vitaliy Liptchinsky
Scaling Deep Learning
Data and Analytics Group Lead @NERSC
Prabhat
Scaling Emerging AI Applications with Ray
Research Assistant @ucbrise
Peter Schafhalter
Petastorm: A Light-Weight Approach to Building ML Pipelines
Tech Lead @Uber
Yevgeni Litvin

2019 Tracks

  • Groking Timeseries & Sequential Data

    Techniques, practices, and approaches around time series and sequential data. Expect topics including image recognition, NLP/NLU, preprocess, & crunching of related algorithms.

  • Deep Learning in Practice

    Deep learning use cases around edge computing, deep learning for search, explainability, fairness, and perception.

Schedule