Cognifest NYC 2017: Penina Kessler, Scala on the Brain: Building a Decision Making Agent with ML

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us! ----- Scala on the Brain: Building a Decision Making Agent with Machine Learning and Functional Programming How do we teach machines to understand natural language, and, once we have, how do we program them to respond? This talk will explore how the x.ai team has used Scala to build out a response system that empowers two meeting scheduling AI agents named Amy and Andrew to digest and react to humans with empathy and professionalism. We will break down the machine stages and draw parallels to existing complex structures designed to make sense of myriad external stimuli: our own brains.Penina Kessler is a Software Developer at x.ai, where she teaches robots how to respond to emails using Scala, and sometimes Javascript too. She holds a degree in Cognitive Psychology and Writing from Wesleyan University.