Walk-through of The Fifth Elephant & Anthill Inside conferences this week

The HasGeek Newsletter ✉️ — July 25th

Good afternoon!

This week, we have two mammoth events: The Fifth Elephant on 27 and 28 July (Thu-Fri) followed by Anthill Inside on 29 July (Sat).

As you might’ve rightly guessed, we are bang in the middle of preparation.

We’ll be live streaming both the events on YouTube, so if you aren’t able to make it, do watch the live streams (YouTube lets you set a reminder):

“Alright. Walk me through what happens at the conference”

The Fifth Elephant and Anthill Inside expose you to trends in data science, deep learning and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, we have taken care to curate conversations on topics that the community cares about, and should know. These conversations will take place at Off-The-Record (OTR) sessions: semi-structured panels where participants can share experiences with practitioners. OTRs will not be live-streamed or recorded so that you can speak candidly.

Let’s walk through the schedules for both events:

Day 1 of The Fifth Elephant features talks on data stores and databases — CosmosDB, hybrid memory database, and the problem of distributed consensus. The moot question, though, is what database, for which use case?
The first day proceeds with talks about distributed ML and distributed systems, and closes with an OTR on “data science in production”. You should be at this OTR if you want to discuss engineering complexities in taking each layer of data science into production. Five practitioners from the community will talk about model versioning, model performance monitoring in production, tooling and libraries for data science and deep learning, cloud and ML, and team structures.
In parallel, we have a series of talk on IoT and data analytics, where practitioners talk about AI and ML in healthcare and data-driven energy systems. MathWorks will also present ThingWorks™ framework, to explain why it enables scaling IoT solutions on the cloud.
The next set of sessions in the banquet hall are very exciting because they touch on the concerns surrounding open data. Rakesh Duddubu from Factly will explain why data sources and organizational culture have played an important role in creating the Telangana government’s open data portal. An OTR on use of open data follows thereafter where Rakesh and open data communities including DataKind, OpenCity and Datameet talk about data parsing, the role of APIs, and address IP and licensing of open data.
We close the first day with lawyers and data scientists talking about the question of bias in algorithms and training models, ethics in data science, privacy and data theft, and the way forward in the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT) in ML OTR.
Day 2 at The Fifth Elephant begins with a series of sessions on data visualization. The presenters then lead an OTR on data visualization where they talk about model visualization, slide generation, and data vis tips and tricks in large organizations versus niche services. Now, this is something to look forward to!
In parallel, we have interesting ML use cases about TV viewership and transactional SMSes, followed by OTRs on what are the interesting problems to solve for building new products with financial data, and engineering and scaling challenges in fleet management and logistics, taking the case of car rentals, food delivery, retail and cab-hailing and ride sharing services.
Finally, continuing the discussion on data science in production and data privacy, you’d like to participate in the discussion about securing ML data in the cloud — best practices, worst case scenarios, etc.
We have also put together OTRs on Druid and Spark where participants can discuss their experiences, and challenges in production; journeys and resources in learning data science; and guffaws about the disaster stories in Machine Learning.

At this point, we’d like to make a special mention about our diversity sponsor — Intuit India — for sponsoring child care facilities at The Fifth Elephant, and Anthill Inside. We’d also like to give a shout out to all the women participants at the conference, persons of non-binary gender, and women data scientists out there to come together to talk about women in data science. This is on day 2, 28 July, from 4 PM to 5 PM, at the food court, thanks to Intuit India. We’d like to talk about community for women and non-binary gender data scientists, the problems we are solving in the field, and how we can foster more diversity in data science.

Anthill Inside, on 29 July, continues the journey left off at The Fifth Elephant. We have curated talks for beginner and advanced audiences. Here are some of the features:

We have talks on Deep Reinforcement Learning and GANS, which are important developments in the field.
We question when to use deep learning and machine learning versus when not to. Technology is an enabler, and is not there for its own sake.
A discussion on AI and Product, takes off from the earlier panel, to understand the data sources and business challenges. Intel has contributed to this discussion with Milind Hanchimani delivering a keynote on the trends in AI and deep learning and product, followed by a tutorial on Intel’s deep learning frameworks.

On that note, Intel has created a developer portal for ML engineers, data scientists and students with resources on optimized frameworks, and training for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. Sign up for Intel® Nervana™ AI Academy: https://software.intel.com/en-us/ai/sign-up

And this is the end of a mammoth email. Phew!

Welcoming all of you to The Fifth Elephant and Anthill Inside. We have created a platform for you to dialogue, debate and become aware of what challenges and opportunities lie before us. Participate!

Visit The Fifth Elephant website here: https://fifthelephant.in/2017/

Visit the Anthill Inside website here: https://anthillinside.in/2017/

The Fifth Elephant is on 27–28 July, Bangalore:
Tickets
Anthill Inside is on 29 July, Bangalore:
Tickets
Fragments is on 12–13 Sept, Bangalore:
Call for Proposals | Tickets
ReactFoo is on 14 Sept, Bangalore:
Call for Proposals | Tickets
JSFoo is on 15–16 Sept, Bangalore:
Call for Proposals | Tickets
CMS Conf is on 1 December, Bangalore:
Call for Proposals