3 ms·

Strata Data Conference Recap

19 points by marcuskaz 16y ago

aaronblohowiak 16y ago
Many videos online!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1&list=PLEF277D84FE2A28D5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1&#3...
bravura 16y ago
[edit: I uploaded my talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEUw8igr1IY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEUw8igr1IY ] I learned a lot of great things at this conference. I will definitely attend the next one in NY in six months. I learned the most just from picking the brains of people in the hallways, really smart people like Chris Wensel and Ken Krugler who have skillsets that are complementary to mine. I gave a talk at Strata, entitled "New Developments in Large Data Techniques": http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/16934 http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/1693... The idea is: There are a lot of new developments in machine learning and NLP that have immediate applications in industry, but that you've never heard of yet. I walked through these ideas in a high-level way and gave a lot of intuition. It was my first talk in industry, but based upon the rating assigned by conference goers (4.26 out of 5 stars), it appears it was one of the top five sessions in the entire conference. I guess I'll have to wait until the voting is closed to know for sure. The video was recorded by O'Reilly, but is now behind a paywall. The good news is that I shot the video on my Kodak Zi8, and will upload it to Vimeo once I can get to an internet connection with fast upstream. You can see the slides here: http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/55/New%20Developments%20in%20Large%20Data%20Techniques%20Presentation.pdf http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/55/New%20Developments%2... I was also interviewed by Silicon Angle, in which I summarized some of the key ideas from my talk in a non-technical way: http://siliconangle.tv/video/joseph-turian-metaoptimizecom-strataconf http://siliconangle.tv/video/joseph-turian-metaoptimizecom-s... I am still on a high that my talk was so well-received, and look forward to trying to do more speaking engagements in the future. I also heard that Berlin Buzzwords in June is a really cool conference, and might try to attend that.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- thr-away 16y ago
  Given your personal take on everything relating to your talk, I decided to do this from a throw-away, just to simplify matters on my end and avoid complications on m-o. Your talk was not bad; it did, as claimed from the get-go, cover a fair bit of ground at a moderate level in very little time. You pointed out the relevant documents to dig deeper, and several people I talked to found you struck the perfect balance there. Now, I disagree with them there: I was after a more technical talk - a token implementation of semantic hashing and discussion of issues run into while making/scaling it would have made this talk amazing for me. But that's a personal preference thing, I was aware of the techniques mentioned before entering so I was not really your target audience. Beyond that, everyone I talked to was unimpressed by your begging for coverage as per the "tweet this" slides and matching vocal appeals for such. This isn't a blog article where you make the appeal clear and loud to get more followers; this was a presentation at an industry conference, and that behavior was particularly out of place and ill-received. In addition, you are the only conference speaker I saw appealing to attendees to rate their talk (at least twice on the #strataconf tag) so i would take the ratings with a grain of salt. I know the above seems very negative, so I should repeat: it was a fairly good talk, and would have been great (even though less technical than I was hoping from the 'practitioner' track) except for the primadonna attitude surrounding it. I have enjoyed many of your postings on HN, I've found substantial value in metaoptimize/qa, and I really wanted to love your talk - so perhaps i'm being unduly harsh. I sincerely hope you will tone down the self-promoting aspect of your talks in future; if you do I will be happy to catch your talk at Strata 2012.
  - bravura 16y ago
    All fair criticisms. I am learning how to promote myself in industry, and I'm not scared to take some risks. I understand how this can lead to gaffes and can be construed as gauche. Gimme some time to work on it. Regarding asking viewers to: "Tweet this". In the speaker room, I heard people talking about how you have to givepeople tweetable sound-bites. I put "Tweet this" images on some slides. It was an experiment and it wasn't well-received. I guess I learned something. Regarding asking people to rate my talk: I learned from my talk that people won't tweet stuff simply because you ask them. Similarly, I think if people disliked my talk then I would have gotten a low rating. Lastly, I appreciate your criticisms. I feel bad that you think that voicing them will cause you problems on m-o. This is not the case. I'm trying to learn something here, and I wouldn't be able to put myself out there if I were super thin-skinned.

19 points by marcuskaz 16y ago

Many videos online!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1&list=PLEF277D84FE2A28D5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1&#3...

bravura 16y ago

[edit: I uploaded my talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEUw8igr1IY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEUw8igr1IY ] I learned a lot of great things at this conference. I will definitely attend the next one in NY in six months. I learned the most just from picking the brains of people in the hallways, really smart people like Chris Wensel and Ken Krugler who have skillsets that are complementary to mine. I gave a talk at Strata, entitled "New Developments in Large Data Techniques": http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/16934 http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/1693... The idea is: There are a lot of new developments in machine learning and NLP that have immediate applications in industry, but that you've never heard of yet. I walked through these ideas in a high-level way and gave a lot of intuition. It was my first talk in industry, but based upon the rating assigned by conference goers (4.26 out of 5 stars), it appears it was one of the top five sessions in the entire conference. I guess I'll have to wait until the voting is closed to know for sure. The video was recorded by O'Reilly, but is now behind a paywall. The good news is that I shot the video on my Kodak Zi8, and will upload it to Vimeo once I can get to an internet connection with fast upstream. You can see the slides here: http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/55/New%20Developments%20in%20Large%20Data%20Techniques%20Presentation.pdf http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/55/New%20Developments%2... I was also interviewed by Silicon Angle, in which I summarized some of the key ideas from my talk in a non-technical way: http://siliconangle.tv/video/joseph-turian-metaoptimizecom-strataconf http://siliconangle.tv/video/joseph-turian-metaoptimizecom-s... I am still on a high that my talk was so well-received, and look forward to trying to do more speaking engagements in the future. I also heard that Berlin Buzzwords in June is a really cool conference, and might try to attend that.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
thr-away 16y ago
Given your personal take on everything relating to your talk, I decided to do this from a throw-away, just to simplify matters on my end and avoid complications on m-o. Your talk was not bad; it did, as claimed from the get-go, cover a fair bit of ground at a moderate level in very little time. You pointed out the relevant documents to dig deeper, and several people I talked to found you struck the perfect balance there. Now, I disagree with them there: I was after a more technical talk - a token implementation of semantic hashing and discussion of issues run into while making/scaling it would have made this talk amazing for me. But that's a personal preference thing, I was aware of the techniques mentioned before entering so I was not really your target audience. Beyond that, everyone I talked to was unimpressed by your begging for coverage as per the "tweet this" slides and matching vocal appeals for such. This isn't a blog article where you make the appeal clear and loud to get more followers; this was a presentation at an industry conference, and that behavior was particularly out of place and ill-received. In addition, you are the only conference speaker I saw appealing to attendees to rate their talk (at least twice on the #strataconf tag) so i would take the ratings with a grain of salt. I know the above seems very negative, so I should repeat: it was a fairly good talk, and would have been great (even though less technical than I was hoping from the 'practitioner' track) except for the primadonna attitude surrounding it. I have enjoyed many of your postings on HN, I've found substantial value in metaoptimize/qa, and I really wanted to love your talk - so perhaps i'm being unduly harsh. I sincerely hope you will tone down the self-promoting aspect of your talks in future; if you do I will be happy to catch your talk at Strata 2012.
- bravura 16y ago
  All fair criticisms. I am learning how to promote myself in industry, and I'm not scared to take some risks. I understand how this can lead to gaffes and can be construed as gauche. Gimme some time to work on it. Regarding asking viewers to: "Tweet this". In the speaker room, I heard people talking about how you have to givepeople tweetable sound-bites. I put "Tweet this" images on some slides. It was an experiment and it wasn't well-received. I guess I learned something. Regarding asking people to rate my talk: I learned from my talk that people won't tweet stuff simply because you ask them. Similarly, I think if people disliked my talk then I would have gotten a low rating. Lastly, I appreciate your criticisms. I feel bad that you think that voicing them will cause you problems on m-o. This is not the case. I'm trying to learn something here, and I wouldn't be able to put myself out there if I were super thin-skinned.