Submissions
The Fifth Elephant
The Fifth Elephant

The Fifth Elephant 2026 Winter Edition

Call for Data Problems and Proposals

Accepting submissions

Not accepting submissions

To reiterate Session types Classical Fifthel data talks - what you learned or what failed - and introspections filled with techniques and fewer jargons. We explicitly seek unfinished work — failures, WIP, unexplained results, datasets looking for questions expand

To reiterate

Session types

  1. Classical Fifthel data talks - what you learned or what failed - and introspections filled with techniques and fewer jargons. We explicitly seek unfinished work — failures, WIP, unexplained results, datasets looking for questions
  2. Showcase - show an innovative idea you are working on. Your idea needn’t be in production. Just use the stage time to tell us why it is a cool idea. Toot the horn, maccha, in 20 minutes only!
  3. Reverse engineer your submission by telling us about a problem you are working on - and who/what you seek in terms of ideas and expertise. If the Three Musketeers like it, your idea may stick on the problem wall, and may find more hoomans and their shoulders.
  4. Facilitate a Birds of Feather (BOF) session - say it in more than words. We’ll get you a whiteboard, a flipchart or anything you need. Heck, even a spaceship, if that’s possible to land at the venue.
  5. Poster sessions - show your WIP/project visually, in the alleyways. We are looking for application of concepts to problems/scenarios in industry, society, economy and even the Silo world!

Not sure about which session fits your work? Just submit. You will receive suggestions, feedback and perhaps, even more questions.

Deadline

  • 11 October for talks and showcase.
  • Infinity and beyond, not really. If the rooms aren’t filled with BOFs, then you get some space, even if we have crossed 30th September.
Make a submission

Vivek Kalyanarangan

Where a query's attention actually lives: measuring how few bits a key needs

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins. more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 17 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Om Asnani

Teaching AI Judgment to Builders: Literacy Rituals That Survive Demo Day

Context: Company: Outskill City: Bengaluru LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omasnani/ Email: omasnani@gmail.com more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 26 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

It Scored 100 Percent Because It Had Stopped Answering

A model I had compressed scored a perfect 100 on one category of a function calling benchmark. It looked like the best result in the table. It was produced by a model that had stopped emitting function calls almost entirely, on 1.2 percent of prompts, and the category in question scores a model on correctly declining to call a function when none applies. A system that has gone silent passes every… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

Two Things I Published, And Then Killed

I published two empirical claims about training neural networks at low precision. Both were plausible, both matched what I had observed, and both are now wrong in my own repository, with the retraction sitting directly underneath the original text. This session is the story of how each one died, because the interesting part is not the claims themselves but the shape of the mistakes, which I think… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

Delete The Exponent: What A Model Actually Does With Its Bits

A floating point number spends most of its bits buying dynamic range. A trained neural network barely uses that range: weights are bounded and clustered near zero. So I built the format that takes the premise literally. Superfloat keeps the sign bit, spends every remaining bit on the significand, and has no exponent field at all, which makes it plain signed fixed point. Twenty minutes is enough t… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

How Few Bits Does A Model Need? 878 Training Runs, One Answer, Several Surprises

This poster presents a year of sweeps asking one question: how few bits does a neural network actually need, and what determines the answer? It covers 878 archived training runs across four scaling tiers and eight follow up experiments, on convolutional networks and transformers, under both training aware and post training compression. more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Poster - work I have done that I can share in the alleyways with attendees
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

Why Is The Checkpoint You Were About To Ship The Worst One To Compress?

Take one model, compress it after training, and measure the damage. Now do that at seven points along its training run, from 2.1 billion tokens to 300 billion. The damage is not monotone. It falls steeply, bottoms out in the middle of training, and then rises sharply at the end. For a 160 million parameter model at seven bits, the penalty is 0.60 nats early, 0.13 nats at the minimum, and 3.16 nat… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: Have a problem I want to discuss I have a submission for: Birds of Feather - I have a problem/idea I want like-minded folks to flock around
Alosh Denny

Alosh Denny

Offering Help On Evaluation Design, Model Compression And Killing Your Own Results

How I want to help rewrite vague problem statements more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 29 Sep 2026
I am submitting: To help with problem statements I have a submission for: Volunteering - as facilitator or to help someone with their problem

Utkarsh Kanwat

Your Agent Can Run as Long as You Can Check It

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 03 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins
Shaurya Srivastava

Shaurya Srivastava

When AI Leaves the Screen: Building Agents for the Physical World

Submission type: Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins Describe your session in 2 paragraphs: more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 04 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins
Surbhi Bhatia

Surbhi Bhatia

A month of making charts

Poster: alleyway Describe your session in 2 paragraphs. Mention 1-2 takeaways from your session. more
  • 1 comment
  • Submitted
  • 06 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To volunteer as a facilitator I have a submission for: Poster - work I have done that I can share in the alleyways with attendees
Omshivaprakash

Omshivaprakash

Beyond Digitisation: Building a Research Desk for Open Knowledge and Indian Languages

Submission type: Talk/Showcase proposal - 20 mins showcase more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 08 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Reginthala Mahesh

611 Accounts, One Person: Finding Repeat Fraudsters Without a Single Label

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins (25 min talk + 5 min Q&A) more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 09 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Reginthala Mahesh

Who Else Is This Customer? Linking Fraud Accounts Without Labels, in Pictures

Submission type: Poster - alleyway The poster When a fraudster’s account gets blocked, they simply make a new one. This poster starts from one real (anonymised) fraud ring of 611 accounts and shows, mostly in pictures, how we found it. We took about 27 million accounts, plus the devices, phone numbers, UPI IDs, locations and names they share, and grouped together the accounts that belong to the s… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 09 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Poster - work I have done that I can share in the alleyways with attendees

Craig Dsouza

Practice + Feedback -> Smarter Children ?

Submission type Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins OR more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 09 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Yogesh Soniwal

Foresight: Beyond Traffic Prediction — Forecasting Sellable Inventory for Retail Media Networks

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Vignesh Mohandas

Beyond the Straight Line: The Math of Competition and Optimization in Ad Pacing

Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins If talk/session proposal, showcase, or poster In advertising technology, pacing is the process of distributing an advertising campaign’s budget or impressions over a given period. It appears simple on paper: use a linear equation to deliver impressions consistently over time. But real-world AdTech systems face fluctuating inventory, competing campaigns, and unpredic… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Rajat Gururaj

More Than Paper Leaks: 110 Incidents of Exam Fraud in India, by Mechanism

Submission type Showcase (20 mins) Title More Than Paper Leaks: 110 Incidents of Exam Fraud in India, by Mechanism more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Varun Tulsian

Nine seminal papers in 30 minutes: one saying behind PageRank, word2vec and attention

Submission type Talk/session proposal (25 min + 5 min Q&A). A 20-minute showcase also works: outline items 3 to 5 and 7. more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Anoop Asranna

What birds tell you about the shape of a lake

Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins If talk/session proposal, showcase, or poster more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Mai Diab

What the Wearer Is Doing vs. Whether It Counts: Context Limits in Egocentric Video Understanding

Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins Description In a robot-learning dataset built from first-person video, idle footage is the most expensive footage there is: it costs the same to store, move and annotate as footage of real work, and it teaches a policy nothing. So we set out to remove it. A vision-language model described each 2–5 second window of head-camera video — which hands were visible and… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 10 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Abhishek Anand

Beyond Prediction: Adaptive Audience Selection with Bayesian Bandits and Constrained Optimization

Submission type - Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins Describe your session in 2 paragraphs more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Tushar Garimalla

AI Credit Manager that makes loan decisions

{Submission type - choose one: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Abhishek Nair

Keyword search beat the LLM: what 160,000 farmer questions taught us about classifying at scale (WIP)

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Krishna Iyengar

Clustering on defect detection image datasets and how embeddings can lead you down the wrong path

Submission type - Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Gopi

Beyond Transformers: Exploring Gradient-Boosted Trees for Language Modeling

Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins Talk duration: 30–40 minutes more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: Have a problem I want to discuss I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Satyavrat Bondre

Show me the rows: metrics in Claude, not text-2-sql chatbots

Submission type Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Ganesh

FlareDB: Apache Beam native streaming database

Submission type: Showcase Session Overview: FlareDB is an Apache Beam-native streaming database for running Beam data pipelines. It’s lightweight and requires fewer resources to run compared to Flink and Spark. It also makes computational results queryable without the need for an external database. more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

Sanket Patil

Agents act on what they are given: data platforms and data quality in an agentic world

Submission type Talk/session proposal – 30–40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Kruthika Kumar Muralidharan

The Company Was Fake. The Analytical Mistakes Were Real.

Submission type: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins
Prathamesh Kalamkar

Prathamesh Kalamkar

Crowdsourcing: Disagreement is the data

{Submission type - choose one: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins} more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Kruthika Kumar Muralidharan

Let AI Do the Work. Keep the Analyst in Charge.

Submission type: Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins An analyst asks why revenue fell. An AI assistant can find the data, write SQL, draw charts, and produce a convincing explanation in minutes. But what if it uses the wrong definition of revenue, compares the wrong periods, or mistakes incomplete data for a real decline? Checking only the final answer is too late. But asking the analyst to approve ev… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

VENU

From Spreadsheet to Spatial Story: Making Data Mappable, Understandable and Shareable

Submission type - choose one: Showcase - new ideas - 20 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

AMIT RAI

[Add a tentative/catchy title for talk/showcase/problem discussion]

{Submission type - choose one: Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins

AMIT RAI

[Add a tentative/catchy title for talk/showcase/problem discussion]

Submission type Showcase — new ideas — 20 mins Title Beyond Cosine: Learning How Bi-Encoders Measure Relevance Describe your session in two paragraphs Bi-encoders represent queries and items as vectors, but ranking usually relies on a fixed similarity function such as cosine. What if we learned the scoring geometry from relevance judgments instead? This session explores a lightweight, relevance-g… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 11 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Showcase - a cool idea I have built/working on - 20 mins
Anoop B S

Anoop B S

Pawan Kumar Singh Author

Real-time Feature Store for Fraud and Risk Management

Submission type: Talk/session proposal — 30–40 minutes more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 12 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Radhika

Creative DataViz: Thinking Beyond Basic Charts

Talk/session proposal - 30-40 mins In this session, I’ll walk through selected dataviz projects I have created based on personal & public data; from the questions that started them to the decisions that shaped their visual language and narrative. I’ll show how I move between collecting information, identifying patterns, experimenting with representation and editing a story into a series of visual… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 15 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: A talk - 30-40 mins

Radhika

The Art of Everyday Data

Submission type: Poster - alleyway I’d love to showcase selected pieces from across my Dataviz projects, where I have explored different styles on how data can become a medium for creative expression, storytelling and reflection. more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 15 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To teach a workshop I have a submission for: Poster - work I have done that I can share in the alleyways with attendees

Naimish Balaji

From Pixels to Equations: Modelling Tropical Cyclone Trajectories with SINDy

Tropical cyclones cause huge loss of life and damage every year, and accurate track forecasts are key to early warnings and evacuations. Current forecasts rely on heavy numerical weather prediction models. We explore a lighter, interpretable alternative: using SINDy (Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics) to discover the governing equations of cyclone motion directly from data. We built a d… more
  • 0 comments
  • Submitted
  • 16 Oct 2026
I am submitting: To speak I have a submission for: Poster - work I have done that I can share in the alleyways with attendees

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