April 27, 2023 — Presentation by Ryan Irwin

Low-latency Neural Network Inference for ML Ranking Applications

At Yelp, we train and deploy models for a variety of business applications requiring low-latency model serving including business recommendations, search, ads, restaurants, and trust & safety use-cases. However, until recently we didn’t have a way of supporting low-latency neural network models with Tensorflow. Such models usually relied on batched model inference in support of models used for photo classification and popular dishes.
In this talk, we give an architectural overview of how we overhauled our ML platform to support neural network models in low-latency ranking applications and how it fits into Yelp’s own near-real time search (Nrtsearch) open-source framework. This work is important to Yelp and to the tech industry to take best advantage of the large volume of data available and provides an approach to using neural networks in latency-sensitive use cases

Speaker

Ryan is an engineering director at Yelp in Machine Learning. He has been at Yelp for 8 years and has worked as a software engineer in data infrastructure and machine learning on a few different teams. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering in Wireless Networking at Virginia Tech.

Moderator

Maoreen is a technical events and partnerships specialist at Yelp. She’s been at Yelp since 2021 and started as a technical sourcer in the Technical Talent team. She completed a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Polytechnic University of the Philippines. As an active member of Awesome Women in Engineering, she co-leads AWE Reads, a safe space for bookworms. Maoreen believes in authentic work environments that prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. When she's not exploring Toronto's food scene, she loves going on long hikes and camping across Ontario.

About Yelping From Home:

Yelp’s mission is to connect people with great local businesses, and two of the teams working behind the scenes to make that happen are our five star engineering and product teams.

Playing an active role in our community is a value that we have strongly prioritized over the years. Typically we would invite you to come to Yelp’s HQ to network, grab a slice of ‘za, and learn about the technology and culture behind Yelp. With stay-at-home orders across the globe, Yelp (like many of you) has had no choice but to adapt to these changes. We understand that this is a strange and challenging time for many, so we’d like to invite you to join us as we navigate this new normal for the tech community together.

To stay connected, create space for folks to collaborate and share some of the things Yelp has been working on, we are launching our very own virtual tech talk series. This series of talks will feature Yelp employees from engineering and product share their stories about career development, technical skills and workplace challenges in a well-distributed environment.