http://aisf19.xnextcon.com Luyuan Fang, Head of AI labs/VP, Expedia Group

1. 1
Travel in the AI-First World
Luyuan Fang
VP, Head of AI Labs
10/8/2019 © 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

2. 2© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Travel
is a force
for good
Economically
For Humankind
Socially
© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

3. 3© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

4. 4© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
>$1.6B
annual tech spend1
1
Total GAAP Selling & Marketing expense and Total GAAP Tech & Content expense plus capitalized software development for 2018. 2
December 31, 2018 ~25k FTE’s + ~15k call center agents 3
$99.7bn for year ended December 31, 2018. 4
Monthly visits based on data for Brand Expedia,
Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, HomeAway, trivago and Hotwire combined during 2018. 5Offline travel agents based on number of sales agents in Global Customer Operations, Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS), HomeAway, Classic Vacations, CruiseShipCenters, Travel Agent Affiliate
Program (TAAP). 6Contacts handled annually include calls, emails, chats and social media. 7Includes more than 370,000 integrated HomeAway listings.
24,000+
Employees
in more than
30 countries
$100B
gross bookings3
200+
Travel Booking Sites
in 70+ Countries

5. 5© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
World’s largest diversified travel platform
Broad and diversified
Supply partners
High volume & diversity of
Customers
Properties on core
lodging platform4,5
1.3M+
Airlines
500+
Car rental companies
175+
Vrbo online bookable
listings5
2M+
Unique activities
35K+
Monthly visits1
750M+
Active corporate travelers
2M+
Contacts handled annually3
50M+
Powering
~100K
Offline travel agents2
Notes: Expedia Group data shown as of 12/31/18, unless otherwise noted. 1Monthly visits based on data for Brand Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, Vrbo, trivago
and Hotwire combined during 2018. 2
Offline travel agents based on number of sales agents in Global Customer Operations, Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS), Vrbo, Classic
Vacations, CruiseShipCenters, Travel Agent Affiliate Program (TAAP). 3Contacts handled annually include calls, emails, chats and social media. 4,5 Includes more than
570,000 integrated Vrbo listings data as of 6/30/19.
Customers Suppliers
Demand
Supply
35K+
B2B partners leveraging
our platform

6. 6© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
We are the
world’s travel
platform
Our purpose is to
bring the world
within reach
With the
help of AI
© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

7. 7© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI in Travel
• A generation of AI Solutions is already widely adopted in the travel industry
• AI is used in all aspects of travel
AI is destined to radically transform the way people plan, book, and enjoy travel
Chatbots NLP/NLU Personalization
Virtual Assistants Dynamic Pricing Image Recognition
• Recommendations
• Personalized Search
• Inquiry Chatbots
Fraud Detection
Trip Planning
• Virtual Assistants
• Customer Service Chatbots
Travel Booking
• Virtual Assistants
• Chatbots
• Customer Support
• Change Management
• Payments
In-Trip Assistance
• Chatbots
• Virtual Butlers
• Concierge Robots
• Voice-Activated Services
• Interactive Services
In-Hotel Assistance
• Differentiated Pricing
• Occupancy Optimization
• Reputation Management
• Competitive Intelligence
• Data Analysis
• Operation Management
• Customer Service
• Partner Management
Hospitality Operator
Assistance
• Feedback/Review
• Chatbots
• Customer Service
Post-Trip Assistance
Recommendations

8. 8© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI at Expedia Group – Examples
Chatbot with DL NLP
https://www.vrbo.com/3630?noDates=true
Let’s chat - Click the “Chat now” button at

9. 9© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI at Expedia Group – Examples (cont.’d)
Text Encoding
Customer Utterances Feature Extraction
Pre-
trained
Bert
Model Training
Intent/Entity Output
Prediction
…
“I love some hot tubs, does this
have one?”
Softmax
…
transformer
⁞
Text Cleaning
Tokenization
Word2vec embedding
⁞
I love one?
utterance intent entity
… equipment hot tub
Question (Q) contextual
word embedding vector
Q-vector + all articles contextual
word embedding vector
Learn to Rank NNs
Recommend 5 top scored articles
… …
Q - Embedding A - Embedding
Learn to Rank
Example 1: Vrbo Inquiry Bot with DL NLU Example 2: Lodging Partner Service FAQ with DL NLU

10. 10© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI at Expedia Group – Examples (cont.’d)
• Expedia Content Moderation with Computer Vision
pretrained ResNet18
https://medium.com/expedia-group-tech/image-moderation-d5e228b3c2d7

11. 11© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI at Expedia Group – Examples (cont.’d)
• Hotels.com Destination Scene Classification with Computer vision
Historical
Beach
Art
Build deep neural network models to identify/Classify the
scene of destination images.

12. 12© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI at Expedia Group – Examples (cont.’d)
• Vrbo personalization/recommendations
Capture real-time traveler interest with Neural Network
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.11336

13. 13© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Travel in the AI-First World
• What is an AI-First Experience?
• Native, end-to-end AI experience
• Unleash the full power of AI
• Travel in the AI-First World
• Elevate travel planning/booking/journey experiences to a whole new level: richer,
more targeted, more immersive, more up-sellable, more captive
• Built on massive Multi-Dimensional, Interconnected, Heterogeneous AI models

14. 14© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
AI-First Travel Planning/Booking/Journey Experience
• AI-First finds optimum trade-offs among multiple, heterogeneous
“dimensions”, specific to each user and each trip, and thus can precisely
understand and deliver “what each user really wants” when planning, booking,
and completing a journey
• It is all about each individual traveler/supplier
Provide the best arrangements and experiences that match
“what each user really wants”

15. 15© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Overcoming the Challenges of the AI-First World
• Scalability in:
• Dimensions
• Volume (# of travelers, # of properties)
• Accuracy, performance, responsiveness
• Data sources
• Geo-distribution
• Reliability, data quality
• Fine tuning to each experience
• Data preparation, data cleaning, feature engineering
• Controllability and observability
• How do we make the Brain “think” what we want?
• How do we understand the Brain?
• Security, privacy, and trust
• Experience design
The larger and more
heterogeneous, the better
An “Art”, requires deep
domain knowledge

16. 16© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
EG AI Platform
Amerigo EG AI PLATFORM
Data Scientists,
Operation,
Engineering
AI Modeling Layer
AI Cockpit
Amerigo
Workspaces
AI Model Dev.
Management
AI Online
Management
AI Workflow
Management
AI Testing
Console
AI DevOp
AI Resource
Management
AI Infra Layer Data I/O
Batch /Streaming
Traffic Management/Policy Enf.
ISTIO
TelemetryCI/CDKubernetes
AI Engineering Layer
AI Event Handling, Stream and Batch Processing Pipeline
AI Compute
Knowledge Factory – Knowledge Graph
AI Solutions
IdentificationConversational ContextPersonalization Recommend. Prediction Search/Sort/Score GeoOptimization Recognition AuctionSmart Ingest
Multi-Dimensional Models
Algorithms
Naïve BayesConvolutional Neural Networks Recurrent Neural Networks Long Short Term Memory Word2Vec Conditional Random Fields
Deep Learning Collaborative FilteringReinforced Learning Embedding
Support Vector Machine
RegressionClassification
ML Libraries
AI Offline Model Development and Training AI Online Inferencing Platform
RT Caches
AI Online Learning
Feature Store Model StoreContext StoreGlobal State Store
Feature Engineering
Data Prep/Labeling/Cleaning

17. 17© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
EG AI Labs
• EG AI Labs is an Applied R&D Lab devoted to infusing and delivering AI in EG
• Rapid, agile, high-impact AI deployment
• Product-Focused, Business-Impact Driven
• EG AI Innovation for industry leadership in AI-First Travel
• Deliverables
• EG AI-First Platform – Infra Foundation and AI Brain
• AI Solutions for Travel
• AI Center of Excellence, attract AI talent, promote AI-First Culture throughout EG

18. 18© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
We’re Hiring!
Careers Site:
LifeatExpedia.com
Tech Blog:
medium.com/expedia-group-tech
Social Media:
@LifeatExpediaGroup

19. 19© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
We’re Moving!

20. 20© 2019 Expedia Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
THANK YOU