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Data Day Texas 2020

Slides and impressions from my first time at ddtx.

Great Expectations
January 29, 2020
Great Expectations
January 29, 2020
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Several people have asked for my slides from Data Day Texas last week. Here they are!

Impressions

This was my first time at the conference. I found it a fun and high-energy group of real, in-the-trenches data people. In other words, I felt very much at home.

Data Day has an unusually strong contingent of graph database afficiandaos. In years past, graphs DBs have sometimes been a separate conference and sometimes just a track within the main conference. Attendees seemed split on this aspect of the conference: some were really excited about graph dbs; others said “yeah, I don’t really go to those talks.” I didn’t hear a lot of people in the middle.

Because the Data Day is only one day and I had my talk in the morning plus office hours in the afternoon, I missed a pretty big slice of the rest of the presentations. Regrets and apologies to all the awesome people who I can’t say anything specific about.

For example, I missed it myself, but I was told that Heidi Waterhouse’s talk on the Death of Data was amazing. I also heard that the Cassandra keynote on the Next Five Years in Databases did a good job bringing a bunch of different trends together.

The human in the loop track

I caught the most talks from the human-in-the-loop ML track. There’s a ton of really interesting thinking going into workflows where humans and machines learn together. We’re rapidly moving past “humans provide labels; machines optimize fit” to a whole bunch of fascinating and specific questions about how.

  • Which labels?
  • In which order?
  • How much trust should be assigned to labels?
  • At what cost?
  • Exactly what is a label? Can they be linked/nested?
  • When can computers suggest, hint, etc. labels?
  • How can we bring external datasources to bear?
  • How do labels and models travel across domains?
  • etc. etc.

Since each of these questions also implies a set of UX and infrastructure decisions, there turns out to be a lot of space for innovation. I left thinking that it’ll be interesting to see how general the solutions turn out to be: will we settle into a handful of widely scaled modes for training HitL ML models? Or will the right solutions be different for every organization?

IMO, the jury’s out, and it’s going to have a big impact on what data science looks like 5 years from now.

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