Scale By The Bay 2020: Catherine Nelson & Hannes Hapke, Automate the boring ML stuff with pipelines
ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Production machine learning systems fail in unexpected ways. The data shifts and the accuracy decreases, or the preprocessing steps don’t match what the model expects. The model looks great when you look at one metric, but you measure it another way and it looks terrible. Tired of writing boring custom code to fix these problems? You need an automated way to stop these potential failures before they happen. In this talk, we’ll describe and demo automated machine learning pipelines using TensorFlow Extended and Kubeflow Pipelines. These pipelines include steps to validate the data that flows into the pipeline, preprocess the data, kick off a training run, analyze the model in-depth, and push the final model to its serving location. All of the steps are orchestrated using Kubeflow Pipelines, which lets you schedule a new pipeline run and makes sure the components are completed in the correct order. We'll show an example project of setting up a simple ML Pipeline which lets us produce consistent ML models. Using public data, we describe how these automated machine learning pipelines solve the problem of a mismatch between feature engineering and model training. We’ll also show how we can analyze our models in depth to ensure they provide a fair experience to all users.
Hannes Hapke
SAP
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Hannes Hapke is a senior data scientist for Concur Labs at SAP Concur, where he explores innovative ways to use machine learning to improve the experience of a business traveler. Prior to joining SAP Concur, Hannes solved machine learning infrastructure problems in various industries including healthcare, retail, recruiting, and renewable energies. Additionally, Hannes has co-authored machine learning publications like O'Reilly's "Building Machine Learning Pipeline" book or
"NLP in Action" with Manning Publishing.
Catherine Nelson
Concur Labs @ SAP Concur
Senior Data Scientist
Catherine Nelson is a Senior Data Scientist for Concur Labs at SAP Concur, where she explores innovative ways to use machine learning to improve the experience of a business traveller. Her key focus areas range from ML explainability and model analysis to privacy-preserving ML. She is also co-author of the forthcoming O'Reilly publication “Building Machine Learning Pipelines", and she is an organizer for Seattle PyLadies, supporting women who code in Python. She has been recognized as a Google Developer Expert in machine learning. In her previous career as a geophysicist she studied ancient volcanoes and explored for oil in Greenland. Catherine has a PhD in geophysics from Durham University and a Masters of Earth Sciences from Oxford University.