Interest in reinforcement learning has grown steadily over the last decade. In a recent post, I described emerging applications of RL in recommendation and personalization systems, and in business simulation and optimization. In this post, I wanted to examine which industry sectors have been mentioning reinforcement learning in their job postings.
Let’s place demand for RL in context by comparing it to demand for deep learning, a class of machine learning models that is beginning to be used widely in industry. In recent months, the number of job postings that mention “reinforcement learning” is about one seventh the number of postings that mention “deep learning”.
I took the companies that accounted for 80% of all RL job postings in July and August, and mapped them to industry sectors. Given the growing interest in RL for recommendation and personalization systems, it’s not too surprising that Retail finished with the most job listings. IT and Software includes companies who are building tools that use RL.
Finance and Manufacturing have been early adopters of machine learning technologies and as it turns out RL is no exception. The upcoming Ray Summit (a free, virtual conference) has numerous sessions from financial services companies, including a keynote by Manuela Veloso (Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research). Manuela will describe how they use RL in electronic trading models. Finally, in a recent post I noted that the Manufacturing sector is the most eager user of machine learning in the U.S.
Learn more about practical applications of reinforcement learning: Join Manuela Veloso and speakers from Amazon, Microsoft, Dow Chemical, Autodesk, Instadeep, and Pathmind at the Ray Summit, a FREE virtual conference which takes place Sep 30th and Oct 1st.
