How AI & Deep Learning Transform 800 Million Items in 190 Countries: eBay’s Approach

This presentation took place at the RE.WORK Deep Learning Summit held in Boston on 26-27 May 2015: http://ift.tt/18Sp8kg In today’s global ecommerce landscape, borders are artificial, and consumers expect to transact anytime, anywhere. The challenge for eBay – one of the world’s largest online marketplaces – is enabling the best-possible commerce experience across 800 million listings from 25 million sellers in 190 countries and multiple languages. Find out how eBay’s product experience team is leveraging AI and deep learning to improve the user experience for today’s global consumer – and how they’re building machine translation and information extraction engines specific to commerce at scale. With nearly 20 years of expertise in language technologies, Hassan Sawaf is well-recognized in the field of machine translation. As senior director of machine translation at eBay, Hassan develops tools and services in language technology to open new markets and enable more opportunities for eBay customers around the world. In his role, Hassan focuses on eBay’s efforts in emerging markets and cross border trade, helping the company develop new ways to solve the language challenge inherent in global online commerce. For the past year, Hassan and his team have developed and implemented language solutions that enable eBay shoppers to more easily access the items they need and love in their native languages, and offer seamless translation options for businesses selling on eBay. Prior to joining eBay in April 2013, Hassan held management roles with several companies in the language solutions space, including AIXPLAIN AG, AppTek Inc., Net2Voice and SAIC. Hassan speaks fluent English, German and Arabic, holds two patents, is a member of the board of directors at idenTV LLC and BlueOSS, and continues to be active in the Angel investor community. He holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Aachen, and attended the university for his Ph.D. studies. In today’s global ecommerce landscape, borders are artificial, and consumers expect to transact anytime, anywhere. The challenge for eBay – one of the world’s largest online marketplaces – is enabling the best-possible commerce experience across 800 million listings from 25 million sellers in 190 countries and multiple languages. Find out how eBay’s product experience team is leveraging AI and deep learning to improve the user experience for today’s global consumer – and how they’re building machine translation and information extraction engines specific to commerce at scale. As Senior Director Global Product Experience, Marc Delingat is responsible for the global customer experience outside of the United States. Marc is focused on building innovative products for eBay’s buyers and sellers, to break down language and market barriers in global commerce, and expand eBay’s geographic footprint. In this role, Marc looks for new opportunities to research, develop, and bring to market new product solutions for emerging markets and improve cross border trade to open up the world’s selection of merchandise. His organization includes product management, applied research, and engineering in human language technology, localization, global product experience, global architecture, and internationalization for all of eBay’s web and mobile products. A proficient English and German speaker, Marc has a keen interest in combining design, technology, science, and language, to build products customers across the world love. Beginning in 2013, he formed the eBay Human Language Technology Research team with the charter to bridge the language gap in global commerce. In 2014 he led the acquisition of parts of AppTek to build out the team and acquire key technologies and intellectual property to further eBay’s leadership position in this area. As a result, eBay is a oft-cited leader in machine translation innovations specific to the field of commerce. #reworkdl