Conference Updates

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! 
 

Google is now sponsoring a new MLconf award program called the MLconf Industry Impact Student Research Award. This November, our committee of distinguished ML professionals will award a student whose research is deemed to be useful for solving the problems currently faced in industry. Last year, we started the tradition of including academic presentations in our events that we felt were relevant to current industry application. One example of this included a talk at MLconf Atlanta, on VoG, an approach that efficiently summarizes large graphs by finding their most interesting and semantically meaningful structures, by Danai Koutra, in her last year as PhD student at Carnegie Mellon. We’re now moving forward with an award for such research.
We need your input!
In our efforts to identify potential nominees, our program committee would like you, our respected leaders from the MLconf community, for recommendations of students that are participating in this instrumental research!
The winner of this contest will be announced at onstage at MLconf San Francisco on Friday, November 13th, 2015. Following the announcement, the winner will be invited to present their work at MLconf in New York City on 04/15/16.
Do you know someone that you’d like to nominate? Click here!
Thanks for participating!
-Courtney, MLconf

HiringSolved comes to MLconf for—you guessed it—hiring
Shon Burton, CEO of HiringSolved, has an interesting challenge. His startup, which specializes in sleuthing out hidden talent using machine learning, needs to find that hidden talent to help fuel the company’s momentum. Guess where he comes to find it—MLconf.
Of course, the CEO sees the irony. “You can’t exactly post a job posting when you’re HiringSolved. MLconf is how we do hiring,” he says.
An Arizona-based company that has sponsored MLconf three times and served clients as prominent as Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, HiringSolved does rely on its own data mining tools and resources for hiring. “But at the end of the day, the best way to hire people is get into the space where they are, meet them, and see them,” the CEO says.
Expecting “high signal to noise ratio”
MLconf, the four-year-old niche event for data scientists who want to dig deep, is what Burton calls a “high signal to noise ratio place. It’s a chance to get in with a lot of people who are very, very focused.”
“You’ll see people with notebooks, writing equations,” Burton says. “For us in that environment, it’s great. Data science is a hugely hot market—and it’s new. The people in it are interested, they have a passion. They’re coming out of physics and molecular biology. The talent is very in demand and hard to find.”
Burton adds another voice to the choir praising MLconf for its smaller scale. “It’s not trying to be all things to all people.” This intimacy lends to ease of networking, he explains.
“Last year we ran into amazing people who helped influence our product literally right there on the floor,” he says. “We had conversations we had that you just don’t get anywhere else—sort of serendipitous connections and bouncing ideas off people. We identified great talent but weren’t at a place where we were hiring. Now we’re scouting talent.”
Seeking the X factor
Burton says that in hiring, his company looks for what he calls the “X” factor. That’s that special tangent to a candidate’s formal training that sets them apart and demonstrates their passion. He says if you’re an aspiring data scientist, you can cultivate the X factor by:

• Connecting to the community by going to events like MLconf, contributing to open source, etc.
• Showing what you’ve accomplished beyond your degree—beyond going to class and going through the curriculum.
• Engaging: getting on Twitter, talking to speakers at events. “Ask the intelligent question, and get them to respond,” Burton advises.

— Natasha Petroff
Natasha Petroff is a senior writer at Kitterman Marketing. Kitterman is a marketing and advertising agency that blends strategic messaging and creative with the latest technology and analytics to create campaigns that deliver measureable results.

Machine Learning is changing the way businesses operate today, the same way that databases changed the corporate world more than 30 years ago. There are currently many prestigious conferences in the space, including: KDD, NIPS and ICML that cover recent inventions in machine learning. Although information is readily available, time constraints prohibit busy data scientists from staying current with the various advances in ML. Even if somebody manages to attend all the sessions or go through all the proceedings, it is impossible to implement and discover the algorithms and business processes that really work and fit your needs.
This is the gap that MLconf is here to bridge. MLconf speakers come from top machine learning companies and share their experience from use cases and distilled knowledge of solutions to real machine learning problems. MLconf talks cover useful information such as: how Google is mining time series, how Yahoo is mining infinite streams of email data, which algorithms Twitter and Netflix are using for recommendations, or what type of data advertisers find useful for targeting. Apart from big established companies, MLconf hosts smaller startups that innovate in the ML space, attacking non-traditional high tech domains, like law and energy or developing new machine learning platforms and tools that are in great demand. At last, every MLconf always includes pioneers from research labs and universities that present the future of Machine Learning.
Although it is possible to fathom the the ML trends by reading blogs, articles or watching videos on the web from the MLconf speaker roster, attending MLconf offers you the opportunity to network with the speakers and a crowd of 300+ data scientists, business executives, engineers and grad students that deal with machine learning in their everyday life. All of that happening in a nice environment, with plenty of coffee, food, and about 70 titles of machine learning books to browse.
So, whether you are a busy professional or a student who wants to find out about Today’s adventures in applied Machine Learning, it is worth investing a day for broadening your horizons in ML by attending MLconf in the city near you. Register now for MLconf SF, which is this Friday, 11/14/14. Mention KDDNuggets and save 15% on tickets!
by Past Technical Committee Chair

The University of San Francisco is sending 35 of their MS in Analytics students to MLconf in San Francisco on 11/14/14! This is great news! We’re honored that MLconf is considered an educational conference for students and professionals.
MLconf was created to host the thought leaders in Machine Learning and Data Science to discuss their most recent experience with applying techniques, tools, algorithms and methodologies to the seemingly impossible problems that occur when dealing with massive and noisy data. MLconf is independent of any outside company or university – it’s simply a conference organized to gather the Machine Learning communities in various cities to share knowledge and create an environment for the community to coalesce.
We couldn’t do it without our sponsors! We’re so grateful to the companies that sponsor MLconf – thanks to their contributions, we’re able to offer low priced tickets to the general public and students and encourage the sharing of knowledge for all whom seek it. Benjamin Franklin said “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” We couldn’t agree more!
We’re looking forward to seeing you all at Parc 55 on November 14th! Haven’t registered? Register Now and save, Early Bird Tickets are still available!

We’re just starting to plan for MLconf SF this November. If you’re interested in presenting, please complete our form here. Abstracts should be 75-100 words in length. Please reference abstracts and slides from previous MLconf events. We look forward to seeing you in November!