We’ve been quite busy, preparing for MLconf Seattle in 3 ½ weeks, but I wanted to take a few moments to share the highlights from our 3rd MLconf NYC, which occurred on April 15th. This year, 400 people gathered at 230 5th Avenue, in Midtown NY. We were quote pleased that the AV and video quality turned out great. Everything seem to flow smoothly except from some glitches here and there. Lunch lines were a bit too long, but thanks to the heroic efforts of the crew the problem got resolved. Attendees were excited that we had more than 100 books to give away, thanks to our generous publishers. The general consensus was that attendees had a great time and the presentation room was full for the full event, through to the last presentation. The floating photographer caught many of nice moments you can find in our Facebook page here.
EEG technology seems to have a sweet spot, last year Ted Willke and Irina Rish astounded the crowd with their stories. This time, it was Jennifer Marsman’s turn with her energetic presentation and futuristic EEG device that excited the audience. Braxton McKee’s talk about how he envisions scalable platforms with more automation and help from the compilers and program analysis seemed to create discussions in the hallways. This MLconf seemed to raise a bit of controversy and discussion during the breaks.
One of the core values of MLconf has been algorithms. We are always looking into new applications and platforms, but algorithms remain an audience favorite. This year it was online algorithm’s turn during the keynote presentation, by Yahoo’s Research Director, Edo Liberty. Sergei Vassilvitskii, Research Scientist at Google, presented on the good old k-means algorithm and recent advances there. Along the same lines, Samantha Kleinberg’s time’s series talk about finding causes, rather than correlations, when the data are highly noisy and often missing captivated the audience pretty early. And that was just the start, Furong Huang’s Tensors, Yael Elmatad’s stable marriages and even more kept the spirit going.
But machine learning is not theory and algorithms only. This time speakers provided their favorite papers and their github repositories here. We’re also creating a new x-ray quiz that will contain all the essentials and key points of MLconf NYC 2016! We’re hoping this “Lessons Learned” tool will aid in content retention for attendees, following each conference. Details to follow soon..
– Nikolaos Vasiloglou, Technical Chair, MLconf
