Evan Estola from Meetup gave probably the second-best talk of the day (I have to give the best talk to Corinna Cortes) talking about our responsibility as wranglers of these learners to protect them from learning bigoted or otherwise harmful patterns. He noted that while some people believe that anything the learner infers from the data is somehow pure and bias-free, it is more accurate to say that while we are tinkering with every other constraint and parameter of a model we might as well fix the stuff that yields socially unwelcome inferences. He said it more elegantly of course, but it was neat that he kind of spanked everybody with that.

When Ben Hamner from Kaggle came up to the stage everyone in the room kind of straightened up and made little waking-up sounds, since Kaggle was recently acquired by Google, and because having the guy from Kaggle in a room full of ML people is a bit like having the guy from Easy Mac in a room full of undergraduate students. He didn't really get into that much in terms of the practice of machine learning, but did mention that winning learners are nearly always ensembles.

In much the same way that the Pomodoro method is like miniature Scrum for time management, I find that Scrum can also be used effectively for personal change.

If, for you, a turkey sandwich can't compete against General Tso's, then bringing in that sandwich is setting yourself up to fail. So, there are two ways to resolve the problem: either find a way to exclude all those other delicious, convenient options, or make your lunch better. The first way is doomed to fail, because we can rationalize anything when we are hungry. The second way, however, is actually pretty easy, and to illustrate, here are the strategies I've found helpful in doing just that.

I can't imagine having to flip switches just to get your programs in. That's probably something to keep in mind the next time I'm complaining that Visual Studio takes two hours to update.

All in all, I'd say the venture rates a 2 out of 10 for getting things done, but a 10 out of 10 for meeting presidents.

Check out the bulletin board at Hard Partyin' Hospital!

We learned all in one day that (1) there is a Microsoft office in Hartford; (2) it is less than a block away; and (3) it is awesome:

The Onion published an article about a fake website that is designed to attract jerk commenters away from real websites. I bought the domain name and created the website, getting over 10,000 visits on the first night, and things were amazing and crazy for a couple weeks.