Where were you on the evening of Monday, March 23rd? Do you remember what you were up to? If you were one of the over 100 attendees to the latest installment of Szilard’s Data Science Meetup, you definitely remember! You were at Cross Campus Santa Monica, receiving a teaser on fundamentals of probabilistic programming by LA ML Meetup founder Rob Zinkov along with a detailed master class on modern machine learning architectures and approaches by Los Angeles’ own Whisper!
Whisper is an anonymous social network that helps people share confessions, express themselves, and meet new people. Whisper positions itself as valuing a strict adherence to the principles of anonymity and privacy - principles which are often at odds with the very drivers behind common applications of Data Science. Whisper is facing many of the problems seen by others in data informed businesses which are driving the forefront of technology. These span from customization and recommendation to fraud prevention and spam, but unlike almost any other business they are addressing them with almost no information about their users. Imagine, having to recommend and curate content for users you know almost nothing about… That’s what the team at Whisper tackles every single day.
Whisper graciously brought 3 team members on stage, each one giving a thoughtful and deep presentation of the state of their current technology, their tools and approaches, as well as interesting discoveries they had made attempting to solve these traditional data science problems in their decidedly non-traditional privacy minded world.
There is no video of this presentation, so unfortunately if you missed the live event, you definitely missed out on both the talk and the spirited discussion afterwards. Fortunately the team at Whisper has been gracious enough to share their slides with us.
We at DSLA are very excited to have hosted Whisper and all of you at this event, and we hope that we’ll see you at a meetup soon! Thanks, as always, to our wonderful venue Cross Campus, and thanks to our wonderful sponsors for this meetup, Factual.
