Building trust into AI takes a talented, driven team across multiple disciplines. Meet Danny, a senior solutions engineer at Fiddler fascinated by all the ways machine learning is used, while his hobby slowly takes over his life.
What do you do at Fiddler AI?
I’m a senior solutions engineer at Fiddler. When you boil it down, this role is really about evangelizing the value of Fiddler to our prospects and customers through product demonstrations or evaluations with their own models and data.
I have to understand the specifics around customer challenges to ensure they get maximum value from Fiddler.
What’s your favorite project so far?
I love building demos! I always have. Demos are easy to build, but finding the datasets to build them from is hard. Datasets that both resonate with customers and appear “real world” are hard to come by and often need to be manufactured.
With an AI Observability platform (formerly Model Performance Management) like Fiddler, you want the models showcased during your demos to have “fresh” events (or inferences). It isn’t as interesting to show the platform with dummy data from six months ago.
I was lucky enough to build a utility internally that manufactures new inferences for any model we have in our trial or demo environments. With this utility in hand, our Fiddler environments always boast inferences that “just happened” and purposefully introduce interesting things in the data, like drift and integrity violations.
This was a really fun project to take on. It was fun to build but now that we have it, it also makes my life easier every day.
What's something about Fiddler that you love and something that can be improved?
I love the mission we have at Fiddler to build Responsible AI. Machine Learning, and more broadly AI, is here to stay. We, as human beings, need to put as much focus on the guard rails of the AI systems we build as we do on the systems themselves. Day to day, it is easy to get caught up in the minutiae of our daily tasks. However, when I force myself to take a step back, I am reminded that what we are building is vital to the co-existence of humanity and AI. We must have ways to observe, understand, and ensure no adverse effects from our AI systems.
Working with our prospects and customers, I’m always floored at the variety of use cases being tackled by ML. As a result, I think Fiddler always needs to strive to test our platform with the same variety that is being employed by our customers. It’s a tall task to find and incorporate as many of these use cases into our testing suite as possible, but it’s vital to the success of our company and mission.
How do you spend your Recharge Days?
I love spending my recharge days – and evenings, weekends, or any spare moment in between – golfing. I would describe my love of golf as more of a curse than a hobby. It’s crazy to me how I can be borderline miserable and stressed out playing a round of golf, yet the second I walk off of the course all I want to do is go play more. I love the game of golf, but it doesn’t always love me!
What fictional world or place would you like to visit?
Good question! I’m not too into sci-fi, but I am still enamored with space. The thought of extraterrestrials is beyond fascinating to me – especially since, statistically speaking, it is pretty much guaranteed that intelligent life outside our planet exists. While not fictional, I suppose I would like to visit another Earth-like planet capable of supporting carbon-based life. Not sure how long I would survive on another planet, but it would be worth every minute.
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Join other brilliant Fiddlers like Danny and help build trust into AI: fiddler.ai/careers
