On March 10-13, cred Managing Director Stephanie Waxman attended the first-ever HumanX conference, one of the best AI events of the year, in Las Vegas. She shares a recap of key themes and takeaways heard while onsite.
Event spotlight: HumanX 2025
Event Spotlight: TED AI 2023
It has been a roller coaster of excitement and anticipation helping plan and execute the first ever TED conference focused on artificial intelligence. For the past 5 months, the cred team has been working closely with TED as leads on the speaker experience team. And this week, we saw it come to life at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. Here are some of our highlights from behind the scenes.
The Unanticipated Benefits of Virtual Events | The Speaker Perspective
We are four months into quarantine, and one of the many things that has changed in our new virtual lives is that events can no longer happen in person. Here at cred, we’ve been closely involved as the events industry has figured out the shift to virtual.
When live events do return, we do not see virtual going away. Virtual events are here to stay and the experience will only continue to improve as virtual event technology is enhanced and event planners, speakers, and attendees become more virtually savvy. This post will focus on the benefits we’ve seen from a speaking perspective.
How’s Your Data Game? An Inside Look at Strata Data Conference
If you are in an industry that touches data and engineering (who doesn’t these days?), there’s no doubt you’ve heard about O’Reilly events and specifically Strata Data Conference (@strataconf). If you didn’t have a chance to attend this year, we’re giving you an inside look at what went down this week when the cred team attended Strata Data at Moscone Center in San Francisco.
Who was speaking on stage?
Only the best and the brightest in the data space, including amazing fierce women leaders.
Amy O’Connor (@ImAmyO) kicked off the main stage content on Wednesday with her keynote on “The journey to the data-driven enterprise from the edge to AI.” As Chief Data and Information Officer at Cloudera, she talked about how the company “drinks its own champagne” by running Cloudera on Cloudera and what they’ve learned on their journey from the edge to AI.
On Thursday, former data scientist and product manager at Airbnb Theresa Johnson (@missjohnson) talked about how she organized uncertainty at Airbnb and why black box models are not helpful. She talked about the internal tools they built to drive an end-to-end metrics forecasting platform, leveraging machine learning, Bayesian inference, TensorFlow, Hadoop, and web technology.
Did it get technical? You bet it did!
On Wednesday, Sonal Gupta, Research Scientist at Facebook, taught us about natural language understanding in task-oriented conversational AI. She outlined a way to do more advanced compositional understanding, which can understand cross-domain queries, using hierarchical representations.
We love seeing our cred clients on stage, especially Manifold.ai CTO Sourav Dey (@resdntalien), who always brings his personality to very technical topics. He did two talks this week, I caught his second on Thursday where he talked about how to attack clustered data with Mixed Effects Randomized Forests (MERF).
Who wants some swag? Let’s check out the Expo Floor.
From professional headshots and massages to “techtris” and skee ball, the fun never stopped at the expo.
We were excited to stop by the Okera booth and congratulate them for their win for Most Disruptive Startup. Their platform tackles the hardest issues behind data access and governance across distributed environments.
Sippy cups are no longer just for babies—this one is for WINE! The team at Alteryx must have known cred was coming, this was winner of favorite swag grab of the day. We also learned a bit about the company, which offers an end-to-end self-service platform for data science and analytics.
We also snagged some cool socks and stickers from Talend, a recognized leader in cloud data integration and data integrity.
Last, but certainly not least, we chatted with our good friend Jonathan Symonds, CMO at Minio, about the company’s open source, enterprise-grade, Amazon S3 compatible object storage. Also got some pretty cool T-shirts to boot.
Should you attend Strata Data?
If you fall into one of the three categories below, we definitely recommend you check out the next Strata Data Conference or one of the other great upcoming O’Reilly events.
Work in data & engineering? This is a great opportunity to learn the latest and greatest tools in the industry, network with your peers, and potentially snag that next great job.
Company with a data science & engineering team? If you’re trying to recruit top talent in the data science & engineering space, Strata Data is the place to connect with prospective candidates.
Company looking to better incorporate data into your business? Attend sessions to see the many cutting edge ways data is being applied within companies across industries and visit the expo floor to meet some amazing companies who may be able to help with your data game.
Want to speak at an event like Strata Data? Get in touch and we’ll see if cred can help you get on stage. Also follow us on Twitter for more great event news and recaps.
