Nuit Blanche: Saturday Morning Video: Europe Wide Machine Learning Meetup: Andrew Ng and more....

When Franck and I were initally thinking about this last Paris Machine Learning meetup of the season, we did not imagine in our wildest assumptions what eventually became a Europe Wide Machine Learning Meetup. We counted 250 people in one room in Paris but other numbers included: 2 Continents, 3 Time Zones, 4 Meetups, 5 locations connected at any one point, 7 presenters such as Francois Sterin, Bastien Legras, Andrew Ng, S. Muthu Muthukrishnan, Yaroslav Bulatov, Camille Couprie and Sam Bessalah. Here is the video of the meetup:

Time of appearance and attendant presentation slides

16:45 Francois Sterin, Google
27:45 Bastien Legras, Google
34:29 Andrew Ng, Baidu Chief Scientist, Coursera Chairman, Stanford (remote)
1:32:17 S. Muthu MuthuKrishnan, Rutgers (remote) : Data Stream Algorithms: Developments and Implications for ML
1:50:24 Yaroslav Bulatov, Google SF (remote), Multi-digit Number Recognition for Street View Imagery using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
2:26:42 Camille Couprie, IFPEN, Semantic scene labeling using feature learning

videos:

2:48:50 Sam Bessalah, Stream Mining via Abstract Algebra (ppt version)

Besides the presenters, our thanks go to:

The sponsor Bastien Legras at Google.

The people who quite simply made it **all** happen in the back end room in Paris: Colin Hunter, Dom Egan and Antoine Bourdain. Seven presentations, three of them on a different continent, interactions between five different locations on three different time zones at any one point of the meetup. The control of three different outputs (what we saw in Paris, what the folks on YouTube saw and a local recording) and a continuous behind the scene discussion with each of the participants (meetups and speakers). Cool under pressure and a flawless execution. Franck and I are still shell schocked it worked out like it did. Just Wow !

The organizers of the Zurich (Martin Jaggi) Berlin (Daniel Nouri, Andreas Mueller) and London (Jacqueline Forien, Libby Kinsey , Jurgen van Gael, Martin Goodson) meetups. They were bold enough to say yes to a meetup during the World Cup. It takes guts, that's all we are going to say about this.

It is obvious to Franck and I that we are collectively more intelligent as a result of that meetup. I'll do a write up of what tool we used and the type of organizations it eventually required to get 250 people in one room.