Machine Learning Unconference

The latest information about the Unconference is now available at the Unconference wiki⁠(opens in a new window), which will be periodically updated with more information for attendees.

Machine learning is moving incredibly quickly. To keep up, many practitioners spend several weeks a year at conferences. However, conference presentations are all on work submitted months prior, meaning that people are already intimately familiar with the content (and it’s often already been surpassed).

We’d like to try instead hosting an event focused on the most valuable part of any conference: the people. Please join us for our first Machine Learning Unconference, an experimental gathering driven by its participants rather than an organizing committee.

The unconference⁠(opens in a new window) will be a free event at the OpenAI office in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, 2016. We welcome participants from around the globe. As of August 22, we have finished accepting applications for the unconference.

Why have an unconference on machine learning?

Conferences play two main roles: social gathering and publication. We feel that these two roles are somewhat orthogonal and can be better served separately.

At most conferences, the unstructured social time, such as mealtimes, is what people find valuable. We want to maximize the amount of interactivity in a social gathering of researchers. A minimally-structured unconference provides an opportunity for an experiment, to see what kinds of new formats attendees will develop, and find out which of these are most effective.

We also have ideas for how to improve the paper reviewing and publication system, which we are developing separately.

Agenda

It would go against the spirit of the unconference for us to provide a specific schedule, but we suggest attendees use the Gitter chat⁠(opens in a new window) to plan a few topics of discussion ahead of time.