Deon Nicholas

San Francisco Bay Area Contact Info
12K followers 500+ connections

Join to view profile

About

Deon is the CEO & Co-founder of TechCrunch Disrupt winner Forethought, the Leading…

Articles by Deon

Activity

Join now to see all activity

Experience & Education

  • Forethought

View Deon’s full experience

See their title, tenure and more.

or

By clicking Continue to join or sign in, you agree to LinkedIn’s User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.

Volunteer Experience

Publications

  • Decision-theoretic Clustering of Strategies

    Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

    Clustering agents by their behaviour can be crucial for building effective agent models. Traditional clustering typically aims to group entities together based on a distance metric, where a desirable clustering is one where the entities in a cluster are spatially close together. Instead, one may desire to cluster based on actionability, or the capacity for the clusters to suggest how an agent should respond to maximize their utility with respect to the entities.

    Segmentation problems…

    Clustering agents by their behaviour can be crucial for building effective agent models. Traditional clustering typically aims to group entities together based on a distance metric, where a desirable clustering is one where the entities in a cluster are spatially close together. Instead, one may desire to cluster based on actionability, or the capacity for the clusters to suggest how an agent should respond to maximize their utility with respect to the entities.

    Segmentation problems examine this decision-theoretic clustering task. Although finding optimal solutions to these problems is computationally hard, greedy-based approximation algorithms exist. However, in settings where the agent has a combinatorially large number of candidate responses whose utilities must be considered, these algorithms are often intractable.

    In this work, we show that in many cases the utility function can be factored to allow for an efficient greedy algorithm even when there are exponentially large response spaces. We evaluate our technique theoretically, proving approximation bounds, and empirically using extensive-form games by clustering opponent strategies in toy poker games.

    Our results demonstrate that these techniques yield dramatically improved clusterings compared to a traditional distance-based clustering approach in terms of both subjective quality and utility obtained by responding to the clusters.

    Other authors
    See publication

  • Automated labeling of bugs and tickets using attention-based mechanisms in recurrent neural networks

    2018 IEEE Second International Conference on Data Stream Mining and Processing

    We explore solutions for automated labeling of content in bug trackers and customer support systems. In order to do that, we classify content in terms of several criteria, such as priority or product area. In the first part of the paper, we provide an overview of existing methods used for text classification.

    In the second part of the paper we present our own recurrent neural network solution based on hierarchical attention paradigm. It consists of several Hierarchical Attention network…

    We explore solutions for automated labeling of content in bug trackers and customer support systems. In order to do that, we classify content in terms of several criteria, such as priority or product area. In the first part of the paper, we provide an overview of existing methods used for text classification.

    In the second part of the paper we present our own recurrent neural network solution based on hierarchical attention paradigm. It consists of several Hierarchical Attention network blocks with varying Gated Recurrent Unit cell sizes and a complementary shallow network that goes alongside.

    Our contributions include a comprehensive benchmark between a variety of methods on relevant datasets; a novel solution that outperforms previous generation methods; and two new datasets that are made public for further research.

    Other authors
    See publication

Patents

  • Atomic update operations in a data storage system

    Issued US 10,346,381 B2

    Technology is disclosed for performing atomic update operations in a storage system (“the technology”). The technology can receive an update command to update a value associated with a key stored in the storage system as a function of an input value; store the input value in a log stored at the storage system but not updating the value stored in the storage system; and update the value associated with the key with the received input values value based on the a function to generate an updated…

    Technology is disclosed for performing atomic update operations in a storage system (“the technology”). The technology can receive an update command to update a value associated with a key stored in the storage system as a function of an input value; store the input value in a log stored at the storage system but not updating the value stored in the storage system; and update the value associated with the key with the received input values value based on the a function to generate an updated value, the updating occurring asynchronously with respect to receiving the update command.

    Other inventors
    See patent

Honors & Awards

  • Forbes 30 Under 30 - Enterprise Technology

    Forbes

  • Best Pitch - SuzyChef

    AT&T Developer Hackathon

    https://developer.att.com/blog/recap-att-silicon-valley-hackathon

    SuzyChef, the smart cooking assistant app we built in 24 hours was awarded "Best Video Pitch", and heralded as "Best Pitch Ever Seen" by AT&T Developer Program Co-ordinator, Ben Nelson.

  • Top Thirteen - ICPC World Finals 2015

    Association for Computing Machinery, International Collegiate Programming Contest

    The University of Waterloo ACM ICPC Team, Waterloo Black, finishes 13th in the world out of 128 teams that competed in the 2015 ACM ICPC World Finals. That year 38,160 contestants from 2,534 universities in 101 countries competed in regional competitions, the top 128 making it to the Finals. Waterloo was top three in North America, behind UC Berkeley and MIT, finishing ahead of CMU, Harvard, and UCLA.

    https://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results

  • Silver Medal - North American Invitational Programming Contest 2015

    University of Chicago, Association for Computing Machinery

    The University of Waterloo ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest team, Waterloo Black, finishes 5th out of the 48 best schools in North America. Other top-10 finishers included MIT, Berkeley, USC, UCLA, and Harvard.

    http://naipc.uchicago.edu/2015/results.html

  • Regional Championship - East Central North America (ECNA) 2015

    ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

    The Waterloo ACM Team, Waterloo Black, won their spot at the World Finals by finishing first at the East Central North America Association for Computing Machinery Regional Programming Contest in Windsor, Ontario ahead of CMU, UMichigan, and University of Toronto.

    https://uwaterloo.ca/computer-science/news/waterloo-black-wins-acm-regional-programming-contest-windsor

  • SAP Labs Canada Scholarship

    SAP Labs Canada

    One of three recipients of the $5000 scholarship awarded to the top Mathematics, Business, and Engineering students with a strong academic record and a keen interest in software development.

  • University of Waterloo President's Scholarship of Distinction

    University of Waterloo

    Awarded to top early-admissions students with an average of 95% or above. Further awarded the University of Wateroo President's Research Award (Part 2 of this Scholarship) due to outstanding research at the undergraduate level.

  • Optimist International Oratorical Contest - Regional Champion

    Optimist International

    My speech, titled "Addressing Apathy" was awarded the 1st Place award, and a $2500 scholarship, at an international public speaking competition focused on world issues.

  • President of Graduating Class

    Edmonton Public Schools - Harry Ainlay

    Was voted President of the Graduating Class by my peers (over 800 students). Led a team of 25 students to make the Commencement and Award Ceremony a reality, with the theme "Let Your Dreams Take Flight".

Recommendations received

1 person has recommended Deon

Join now to view

More activity by Deon

View Deon’s full profile

  • See who you know in common
  • Get introduced
  • Contact Deon directly
Join to view full profile

Other similar profiles

Explore collaborative articles

We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.

Explore More

Others named Deon Nicholas

4 others named Deon Nicholas are on LinkedIn

See others named Deon Nicholas

Add new skills with these courses

See all courses