{"id":23073,"date":"2019-08-19T08:30:57","date_gmt":"2019-08-19T15:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/insidebigdata.com\/?p=23073"},"modified":"2021-04-16T11:32:15","modified_gmt":"2021-04-16T18:32:15","slug":"field-report-kdd-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/insidebigdata.com\/2019\/08\/19\/field-report-kdd-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Field Report: KDD 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a very long time member of the ACM and their SIGKDD group, I’d always wanted to attend a KDD conference (first one occurred in 1995). This year I received a gracious invitation to attend KDD2019<\/a> in Anchorage, Alaska, August 4-8. It satisfied two of my bucket list items: witnessing a KDD first-hand and also visiting Anchorage. I was not disappointed with the experience! What follows is my “Field Report,” a travel log if you will, chronicling my observations, both technical and cultural. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

KDD is touted as being “the premier interdisciplinary conference bringing together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, large-scale data analytics, and big data.” The show was very academic, which is something you’d expect being that KDD ( vis-\u00e0-vis SIGKDD) is part of the ACM, computing’s oldest and most respected international learned society. But I learned that in the past several years the conference has developed a unique industry perspective as well. The attendees, all 3,200 of us (we increased the population of Anchorage by 1%), were evenly split between academia and industry. It made for a very well-rounded experience that I think everyone appreciated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started my journey from Los Angeles, my home base, and found the 5 hour flight to be nearly as long as the one to Honolulu (one of my regular holiday destinations). I’m not sure what I expected of either the conference or the venue, but I warmed up to both quickly. My hotel was a short walk to one of the two conference centers (Egan, while Dena’ina was another two blocks away). On my initial walk Monday afternoon to Egan, my stomach was empty and I was on the look out for some fast food, but I never found any of the typical American fast food establishments. Instead I came across a hot dog cart selling “Reindeer sausage” on a bun. I was in heaven. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After picking up my badge, I headed over to my first session, the “AutoML and Development Frameworks” series of talks. AutoML is a pretty hot topic, and one that resonates very well with insideBIGDATA readers, so I was eager to hear some new perspectives. I really enjoyed the talk “Auto-Keras: An Efficient Neural Architecture Search System<\/a>,” but the other 4 presentations were also quite compelling (the entire session was 2 hours). The full Proceedings for the conference including links to all accepted papers can be found HERE<\/a>. In preparation for the conference, I went through the ENTIRE list of papers and selected my top 10 to print out and take along for the long flights back and forth. Here’s the list in no particular order:<\/p>\n\n\n\n