In this special #TWIMLfest episode, we’re joined by Suzana Ilić, a computational linguist at Causaly and founder of Machine Learning Tokyo (MLT). Suzana joined us as a keynote speaker to discuss the origins of the MLT community, but we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We briefly discuss Suzana’s work at Causaly, touching on her experiences transitioning from linguist and domain expert to working with causal modeling, balancing her role as both product manager and leader of the development team for their causality extraction module, and the unique ways that she thinks about UI in relation to their product. We also spend quite a bit of time exploring MLT, including how they’ve achieved exponential growth within the community over the past few years and when Suzana knew MLT was moving beyond just a personal endeavor, her experiences publishing papers at major ML conferences as an independent organization, and inspires her within the broader ML/AI Community. And of course, we answer quite a few great questions from our live audience!