Conferences on Harlan D. Harris

New Publications and Upcoming Talks

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick post here to note a few professional accomplishments:

I just added a new publication to my vita -- a peer-reviewed conference proceeedings article about abstractions for building repeated, related versions of similar predictive models. Check out some longer thoughts on Medium, or read the full article.
Earlier this year, I added an incredibly old project! A paper that I had contributed a bit to in... 2005! finally got published! It has something to do with the way information flows during speech perception... I think...
I'll be talking at two Meetups this Fall -- the RecSys NYC Meetup on Sept. 18th, and the Dataiku Data Science Meetup on Sept. 26th. In both Meetups, I'll be talking about (different) aspects of recommendations systems I'm building at WayUp.
And I'll be talking at two conferences this Fall too -- the Predictive APIs conference in Boston in October, and DataEngConf in NYC in November. At both of those conferences, I'll be talking about the software architecture aspects of building job recommendation systems that need to provide compelling recommendations just seconds after a user creates a rich profile.

A few things I learned from two small Data Science conferences

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Medium

I recently attended two small conferences — the ISBIS (International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017 conference, held at IBM Research in Westchester County, and the Domino Data Lab Popup, held in West SoHo. I was invited to speak at ISBIS (slides here, if you’re curious), but for this post, I want to summarize some insights from other people’s talks.

In chronological (to me) order… First a few talks from ISBIS that I particularly liked (note that I only saw a fraction of all the talks):

Conference Blogging INFORMS Analytics 2017

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post was originally published on Medium

A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just summarizing what you saw, or making snarky Twitter comments (also worth doing!), a great conference blog post is synthesis — combining insights from multiple presentations and conversations into a coherent new whole that helps clarify ideas.

Why a Data Community is Like a Music Scene -- Resources

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday, October 28th, 2013, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk entitled “Why a Data Community is Like a Music Scene” at an event associated with the Strata conference. Here’s the video:

And here are the acknowledgements and references for the talk:

Data Community DC

How Music Works, by David Byrne

my slides for the Ignite talk

my blog post (written first)

Photos:

CBGB’s exterior: NYC - East Village: CBGB & OMFUG by wallyg, on Flickr (Creative Commons)
Grafitti wall: cbgb, september 2006 (#1) by joe holmes, on Flickr (Creative Commons)
Joan Jett with beer: 1977 Los Angeles, CA-Joan Jett of the Runaways backstage at The Whiskey A Go Go. (Photos by Brad Elterman/BuzzFoto.com)
CSN: legendsrevealed.com
Flats to Let: skyscrapercity.com
Dressing room: CBGBS Dresssing Room by Chris Infidel, on Flickr
Snog: _MG_1977.jpg by dinoboy, on Flickr

Communication and the Data Scientist

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I recently gave a presentation on communication issues around the terms “Data Science” and “Data Scientist”, based in part on a survey that I did with my Meetup colleagues Marck and Sean. The basic idea is that these new, extremely-broad buzzwords have resulted in confusion, which has impacted the ability of people with skills and people with data to meet and effectively communicate about who does what and what appropriate expectations should be. The survey was an attempt to bring some clarity to the issue of who are the people in this newly-reformulated community, and how do they view themselves and their skills. For more on the survey, see our post on the Data Community DC blog. Here’s the video of my presentation at DataGotham:

integrating R with other systems

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update to Rserve that includes 1-stop web services, and a presentation on ESB integration. Although I didn’t see it discussed, the new httr package for easier access to web services is also another outstanding development in integrating R into large-scale systems.

On "Analytics" and related fields

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, aka “INFORMS Analytics 2011”, conference in Chicago. This deserves a little bit of an explanation. INFORMS is the professional organization for Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS), which are terms describing approaches to improving business efficiency by use of mathematical optimization and simulation tools. OR is perhaps best known for the technique of Linear Programming (read “Programming” as “Planning”), which is a method for optimizing a useful class of mathematical expressions under various constraints extremely efficiently. You can, for example, solve scheduling, assignment, transportation, factory layout, and similar problems with millions of variables in seconds. These techniques came out of large-scale government and especially military logistics and decision-making needs of the mid-20th century, and have now been applied extensively in many industries. Have you seen the UPS “We (heart) Logistics” ad? That’s OR.