Takeaways from Strata Data Conference in NYC

Strata is a conference focused on data science and enterprise AI/ML. Recently I got a chance to attend and observed some new developments in the field. Here I’ll highlight some talks and concepts I find interesting.

Visual & Hand-drawn queries as data input

In a talk on data science for sports, speaker Patrick Lucey showcased using visual queries to search for patterns that are hard to describe with words. One can pause at a frame in a visual representation of game day video and find the similar attack/defense strategies, draw a trajectory of a player to query similar movements, or shift the position a player on the field to simulate different outcomes.

I find it refreshing because oftentimes visualization is seen as the output layer instead of the input layer. It has always been used for presenting/communicating, exposing patterns and conducting diagnoses. But chart is not only an endpoint for perception, it can also be a starting point for reflection. When search queries are easier to describe with pictures, images, gestures rather than words, visual search powered by computer vision could be useful.

Machine learning across the data science lifecycle

Overall the conference consists of keynotes in the morning and more than a dozen sessions running in parallel in the afternoon covering topics from anomaly detection, time series, machine learning war stories, regulatory concerns to edge computing.

Spark have been a recurring topic, together with its numerous combinations with other technologies such as SparkNLP, spark on Kubernetes etc. Besides data scientists attendees, there is a large data engineering crowd, plus software vendors for various data platforms. When next year Strata Data Conf and O’Reilly AI Conf become co-located, the mixture might shift again.

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