The day after an MLconf is always very relieving. We can’t resist thinking though about what went well and what went wrong. I have to say that there were some unforeseen last minute changes- We had a speaker unable to participate because of a car accident (don’t worry he is ok now), a withdrawal of a talk (yes sometime people realize their results are different than expected) and two other companies had to change their speaker because of internal obligations. On top of that there was technical problem with the badges the day before an AV black out 10 minutes before the beginning of the conference. Additionally, the well-anticipated books by Pedro Domingos arrived the day after the event! (Thanks UPS!!). Thanks to the titanic effort of Courtney, Tyler and the rest of the crew, most of these glitches were fixed and did not affect the quality of the event!
On the other hand there were some last minute additions to the program that had huge success. Our collaboration with Welch Labs that was agreed a few days prior to the event was well received and audience loved the short tutorial videos. We noticed that 100% of the attendees prefered to delay their lunch or coffee in order to watch the videos. Also the last minute participation of the champion robotics team from Grady High School gave us some nice moments during the lunch break.
The feedback from the audience was very encouraging and we feel like we met the expectations in terms of the content and the experience. Learning from our experiences, we are thrilled to host the next event in San Francisco November 13th with a great line-up of speakers! Readers of this blog mention “Blog15” and save 15% on tickets to MLconf SF from now until 10/01/15!
