ACM KDD 2017 Conference in Halifax, NS, Canada
ACM KDD 2017 Conference in Halifax, NS, Canada
In total, 1690 attendees came to the port town of Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) to talk data mining, data science and analytics. KDD is the 23rd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The main themes of the conference included: Deep Learning, analyzing streaming data, ... . In the picture above you see the World Trade & Convention Center where the event took place. With such a big event, many sessions take place in parallel, so my impressions reported here may differ substantially from other attendees. It’s totally dependent on the choices you make.
The conference kicked-off with a tutorial day on Sunday. I decided to attend the great “Deep Learning for Personalized Search and Recommender Systems” tutorial by LinkedIn (@LinkedInEng) and Airbnb (@AirbnbEng) engineers.
Thursday, 17 August 2017
Please check in again in the coming days for updates to this blog post. All the pictures posted here carry the copyright by Dr. Dirk Van den Poel (Ghent University, Belgium).
Sunday afternoon, I attended Microsoft’s tutorial on “A/B Testing at Scale: Accelerating Software Innovation” by Dr. Ronny Kohavi (see picture below) and colleagues.
On Monday morning, I attended the tutorial on @ApacheSAMOA by Dr. Albert Bifet (@abifet).
Next, I attended the talk by Sid Ghoshal and Stephen Roberts on “Reading the Tea Leaves: A Neural Network Perspective on Technical Trading” on using data mining for stock-market predictions.
In the afternoon, I attended the WISDOM Workshop.
One of the 20 workshops was the Workshop on Issues of Sentiment Discovery and Opinion Mining (WISDOM). First up was the keynote talk by Dr. Xiaodan Zhu (NRC Canada and University of Ottawa, see picture below).
Finally, the three conference co-chairs held the official opening session in the Scotiabank Hockey Arena.
On August 15th, 2017 KDD started the day with a keynote by Prof. Dr. Bin Yu (UC Berkeley, see picture below) on the topic of “Three Principles of Data Science: Predictability, Stability and Computability.”
Coffee/tea breaks were mostly held in the exhibit hall (part of the hockey arena). Many of the largest internet companies were present as sponsors and exhibitors.
Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain one of the cute Didi cars (see picture below).
Then, I attended a Google session. The first talk in the session was on Google Vizier: A service for black-box optimization.
Next, was the talk on
Finally, I attended the Alibaba talk.
In the afternoon, I attended the hands-on tutorial on Streaming Data by Dr. Bernhard Pfahringer (University of Waikato) and Dr. Albert Bifet (TelecomParisTech).
Wednesday morning kicked off with a keynote talk by Dr. Cynthia Dwork (Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research / Harvard University) with the title “What's Fair?” She started off citing some counterintuitive results.
Next, Dr. Vipin Kumar gave a talk titled “Big Data in Climate: Opportunities and Challenges for Machine Learning and Data Mining.”
Next, Nicholas Malizia (@telluslabs) gave a superb talk on remote sensing (see picture below).
Below, you see a particularly cool example of using remote sensing to assess the amount of oil in storage tanks.