

Strata Data Conference Recap - marcuskaz
http://mkaz.com/archives/1550/strata-data-conference-recap/

======
bravura
[edit: I uploaded my talk: <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/1693...](http://strataconf.com/strata2011/public/schedule/detail/16934)
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%2...](http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/55/New%20Developments%20in%20Large%20Data%20Techniques%20Presentation.pdf)

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-s...](http://siliconangle.tv/video/joseph-turian-
metaoptimizecom-strataconf)

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.

~~~
thr-away
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
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.

------
aaronblohowiak
Many videos online!!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDnqGWARu8&playnext=1&list=PLEF277D84FE2A28D5)

