ML Meetup Success!
This is a guest post from ML Meetup organizer Tony Tran.
The SF Bay Area ML Meetup group recently held an event at Sift Science. It was our first time hosting an event at Sift, as well as our first time having Sift engineers present. Overall, it was an excellent event. The food was great, the venue was beautiful, and our hosts were extremely kind. Those of you who couldn’t attend really missed out! But not to worry, I’ll give you a quick run-down of what happened.
“What did I miss with the talks?”
Both of the presentation slides are available online (ml_infrastructure, feature_engineering) and are easy to understand without narration.
Andrey Gusev gave a lightning talk on “Machine Learning Infrasture.” In it he discussed:
- Data transformations
- Online and Batch learning
- Motivations for using HBase
Doug Beeferman gave the main presentation on “Feature Engineering for Real-Time Fraud Detection.” In it he discussed:
- What “fraud” means
- Useful features for fraud detection
- 10 Lessons Learned (this was extremely insightful)
Unfortunately, my above bullet points don’t do the talks justice, so definitely check out the slides (ml_infrastructure, feature_engineering). Also, Andrey gave a similar talk at the HBase meetup that was recorded (link).
“How was Sift Science?”
One of the most common questions that I get from people who didn’t attend the event is, “how was Sift Science?”
There were a total of 15 Sift Science employees at the event including the CEO and CTO. In my opinion, it really says a lot about the company when both the CEO and CTO are present for community events like these — I haven’t seen this happen too often.
My impression of Sift was that everyone was extremely humble and willing to help. In addition, the team came off as being very serious when it came to engineering quality, yet very light hearted when it came to interacting with one another. I would say that Sift did a great job at building their company culture. It feels like a place where people would genuinely feel happy coming to work (at least that’s what they tell me).
Would I recommend checking them out if you’re an engineer, or even a non-engineer, looking for a place to work? Absolutely.
Just to clarify, I am in no way affiliated with Sift Science. If you have any questions about this event, or want to get my thoughts on Sift Science, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@quicksorter) or message me via the meetup group.
Would I recommend checking them out if you’re an engineer, or even a non-engineer, looking for a place to work? Absolutely.
Just to clarify, I am in no way affiliated with Sift Science. If you have any questions about this event, or want to get my thoughts on Sift Science, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@quicksorter) or message me via the meetup group.
