The Fifth Elephant 2017

On data engineering and application of ML in diverse domains

##Theme and format
The Fifth Elephant 2017 is a four-track conference on:

  1. Data engineering – building pipelines and platforms; exposure to latest open source tools for data mining and real-time analytics.
  2. Application of Machine Learning (ML) in diverse domains such as IOT, payments, e-commerce, education, ecology, government, agriculture, computational biology, social network analysis and emerging markets.
  3. Hands-on tutorials on data mining tools, and ML platforms and techniques.
  4. Off-the-record (OTR) sessions on privacy issues concerning data; building data pipelines; failure stories in ML; interesting problems to solve with data science; and other relevant topics.

The Fifth Elephant is a conference for practitioners, by practitioners.

Talk submissions are now closed.

You must submit the following details along with your proposal, or within 10 days of submission:

  1. Draft slides, mind map or a textual description detailing the structure and content of your talk.
  2. Link to a self-record, two-minute preview video, where you explain what your talk is about, and the key takeaways for participants. This preview video helps conference editors understand the lucidity of your thoughts and how invested you are in presenting insights beyond your use case. Please note that the preview video should be submitted irrespective of whether you have spoken at past editions of The Fifth Elephant.
  3. If you submit a workshop proposal, you must specify the target audience for your workshop; duration; number of participants you can accommodate; pre-requisites for the workshop; link to GitHub repositories and documents showing the full workshop plan.

##About the conference
This year is the sixth edition of The Fifth Elephant. The conference is a renowned gathering of data scientists, programmers, analysts, researchers, and technologists working in the areas of data mining, analytics, machine learning and deep learning from different domains.

We invite proposals for the following sessions, with a clear focus on the big picture and insights that participants can apply in their work:

  • Full-length, 40-minute talks.
  • Crisp, 15-minute talks.
  • Sponsored sessions, of 15 minutes and 40 minutes duration (limited slots available; subject to editorial scrutiny and approval).
  • Hands-on tutorials and workshop sessions of 3-hour and 6-hour duration where participants follow instructors on their laptops.
  • Off-the-record (OTR) sessions of 60-90 minutes duration.

##Selection Process

  1. Proposals will be filtered and shortlisted by an Editorial Panel.
  2. Proposers, editors and community members must respond to comments as openly as possible so that the selection processs is transparent.
  3. Proposers are also encouraged to vote and comment on other proposals submitted here.

Selection Process Flowchart

We will notify you if we move your proposal to the next round or reject it. A speaker is NOT confirmed for a slot unless we explicitly mention so in an email or over any other medium of communication.

Selected speakers must participate in one or two rounds of rehearsals before the conference. This is mandatory and helps you to prepare well for the conference.

There is only one speaker per session. Entry is free for selected speakers.

##Travel grants
Partial or full grants, covering travel and accomodation are made available to speakers delivering full sessions (40 minutes) and workshops. Grants are limited, and are given in the order of preference to students, women, persons of non-binary genders, and speakers from Asia and Africa.

##Commitment to Open Source
We believe in open source as the binding force of our community. If you are describing a codebase for developers to work with, we’d like for it to be available under a permissive open source licence. If your software is commercially licensed or available under a combination of commercial and restrictive open source licences (such as the various forms of the GPL), you should consider picking up a sponsorship. We recognise that there are valid reasons for commercial licensing, but ask that you support the conference in return for giving you an audience. Your session will be marked on the schedule as a “sponsored session”.

##Important Dates:

  • Deadline for submitting proposals: June 10
  • First draft of the coference schedule: June 20
  • Tutorial and workshop announcements: June 20
  • Final conference schedule: July 5
  • Conference dates: 27-28 July

##Contact
For more information about speaking proposals, tickets and sponsorships, contact info@hasgeek.com or call +91-7676332020.

Hosted by

The Fifth Elephant - known as one of the best data science and Machine Learning conference in Asia - has transitioned into a year-round forum for conversations about data and ML engineering; data science in production; data security and privacy practices. more

Anand Chitipothu

@anandology

Distributed Machine Learning - Challenges and Oppurtunities

Submitted Jun 10, 2017

The traditional machine learning libraries like scikit-learn in Python are written to work on a single computer. While that is good enough for small datasets, traning ML models on large datasets often taken very long time.

While tools like Apache Spark allows the users to run the ML algorithms in a cluster, it requires a completely new way to doing things and it comes with the complexity of managing the infrastructure.

The tools like scikit-learn can’t be easily adopted to platforms like Spark because these platforms exploit the data parallelism. That requires all the algorithms to be use implemeted with data parallism in mind.

The other oppurtinity is to exploit the task parallelism inherently present in many ML workflows like hyperparameter optimization. Doing a hyperparameter optimiation involves trainining multiple models with different parameters and picking the best. Training each of these models can be done in parallel and can be distributed to multiple nodes.

There is some interesting work done in this area like dask from continnum and spark-sklearn from databricks. The dask project even provides tools to spawn a cluster on AWS to distribute the load. While these approaches looks promising, there are not very accessible to data scientists as they come with the burden of managing infrastructure.

We at rorodata have been trying to find way to simplify this and make data scientists run they ML trainings faster without worrying about infrastructure. We’ve built a tool called rorocloud, a serverless platform to run data science experiements and built simple tools to achive task parallism on the rorocloud.

In this talk I’m going to explore the oppunities present to paralleize the ML training workflows, the challenges with the currently available options and share the learnings from our experiments.

Outline

  • Traditional Machine Learning and opputinities for parallism
  • Available solutions for distributing and the challenges
  • Our aproach
  • Learnings from our experiments

Speaker bio

Anand has been crafting beautiful software since a decade and half. He’s now building a data science platform, rorodata, which he recently co-founded. He regularly conducts advanced programming courses through Pipal Academy. He is co-author of web.py, a micro web framework in Python. He has worked at Strand Life Sciences and Internet Archive.

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/anandology/distributed-machine-learning-challenges-and-oppurtunities

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Hosted by

The Fifth Elephant - known as one of the best data science and Machine Learning conference in Asia - has transitioned into a year-round forum for conversations about data and ML engineering; data science in production; data security and privacy practices. more