Meetup 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.

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.

Data Science, Moore's Law, and Moneyball

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fond of navel gazing, meta discussions, and so forth. I’ve recently written about inferring navel gazing from link data, and about the meaning of the “Analytics” buzzword. This post will be my second on that other infectious buzzword, “Data Science”.

When I moved to Washington DC in July, I was struck by the fact that there was no Meetup for analytics/applied statistics/machine learning/data science. There’s a great DC Tech Meetup, a great Big Data Meetup, and a great R Meetup, but nothing like the NYC Predictive Analytics Meetup. So, I and a couple of others I talked to about this (Marck Vaisman, who I first met through the NYC R Meetup a couple years ago, and Matt Bryan, who I met just after moving to town), started a new Meetup, which we decided to call “Data Science DC”.

how to speak ggplot2 like a native, and Predictive Analytics World

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently given the opportunity to re-present my ggplot2 talk, which I originally gave to the NYC R Meetup, to the DC R Meetup group. The Meetup was held co-located with the Predictive Analytics World conference in Alexandria, VA. (More on my thoughts on PAW below…) Contentwise, I made only small changes, changing a bit of patter and adding more examples at the end. I still love ggplot, with some frustration at the way it is typically introduced. Some of the audience had no R experience at all, while others were experts. One person, a grad student at U. of Maryland, had had very similar difficulty as I had when originally learning ggplot2, and his enthusiastic nods during my presentation were very validating! For reference, the Meetup page is here, and I stuck the current version of the slides in a public Dropbox, located here.

Prediction with Multilevel Regression Models, and Pizza

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The Meetup phenomenon, which is now substantial and longstanding enough to be more of a cultural change than a flash in the pan, continues to impress me. Even more so than tools like LinkedIn, Meetups have changed the nature of professional networking, making it more informal, diverse, and decentralized. Last night, statistics consultant (and cheap eats guru) Jared Lander and I presented a talk on a statistical technique tangentially related to my professional work (more closely associated with Jared’s). The origin of this presentation is worth noting. On Meetup’s web site, members of a group can suggest topics for meetings. Before even attending a single NYC Predictive Analytics event, I posted several topics that I thought might be interesting for the group. A bit later, the organizers (Bruno and Alex) contacted me to see if I’d be willing to present on prediction with Multilevel models. I said that I would, but only if I could co-present with someone who actually knew something about the topic a complementary set of skills and experiences. Knowing Jared from the NYC R Meetup group, and knowing that he learned about multilevel models from the professor who wrote the best book on the topic, and knowing that he’s pretty good in front of an audience, I suggested we collaborate.