Today we’re joined by Michael McCourt the head of engineering at SigOpt. In our conversation with Michael, we explore the vast space around the topic of optimization, including the technical differences between ML and optimization and where they’re applied, what the path to increasing complexity looks like for a practitioner and the relationship between optimization and active learning. We also discuss the research frontier for optimization and how folks think about the interesting challenges and open questions for this field, how optimization approaches appeared at the latest NeurIPS conference, and Mike’s excitement for the emergence of interdisciplinary work between the machine learning community and other fields like the natural sciences. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/545