Introduction

The 2016 edition is over. The Fifth Elephant will be back next year.

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The Fifth Elephant is India’s most renowned conference on data, a space for discussing the most relevant tools, techniques and frameworks with expert practitioners in the field.

Conference Highlights

Foursquare is a popular app; Chipotle, a successful restaurant chain. Foursquare used the drop in walk-ins by its users into Chipotle to predict a 30% fall in Chipotle's earnings – to the last percentage point. This is the power of data, even – or especially – ‘alternative’ data.

The advent of Machine Learning has been described as the second industrial revolution. Join the vanguard at this years’ edition of The Fifth Elephant: we’ll be looking at where and how ML has penetrated the marketplace and into domains like fintech, finance, advertising, e-commerce, health and education.

We'll also look at handling data at scale, and handling it in real time, and the challenges of bringing realtime logging, realtime analysis, and the processing of massive datasets into production. Not least, we've got to know how good our data is – so we'll go over the best benchmarking tools, versioning and how best to handle large data for business.

If you're getting your hands dirty as an engineer or analyzing complex datasets, optimizing returns across your business or looking for optimal returns for your capital, join us at The Fifth Elephant. If you'd prefer to get a longer, more hands-on experience, consider attending our workshops.

  • Gene Ekster

    Gene Ekster

    Analyst; Investment consultant

    The Alternative Data revolution on Wall St

    Gene is a pioneer of the alternative data approach in investment banking, piecing together correlated features to zero in on the fundamentals of a target company. Check out his whitepaper Driving Investment Performance With Alternative Data, or sample his blog.

    He will walk us through how tools such as machine learning and text mining is used by traditional investment funds to convert noisy, unstructured data from datasets such as point of sale transactions, web site usage, municipality records and social media data into an investable signal.

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  • Aruna S

    Aruna S

    Developer at Mapbox

    Reducing the world with JavaScript

    OpenStreetMap is the largest living open map of the world with a collection of over 1B mapped roads and ~2B mapped buildings. Aruna tells us how she uses TileReduce at MapBox to break down the processing of massive amounts of geo-data using the MapReduce concept on vector tiles. Her talk will cover the JavaScript principles behind it, how parallelising works on TileReduce, the skeleton of a simple program written with it and showcase some ways in which you can use TileReduce in your work.

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  • Saurabh Arora

    Saurabh Arora

    Entrepreneur and machine learning researcher

    Continuous online learning for classification tasks

    Saurabh dropped out of his doctoral program in the Hasso-plattner Institute Berlin to found Airwoot, where they model margin-based classifiers to filter spam on social media. To improve accuracy, they had to keep track of two kinds of conceptual ‘drift’ -- for the average user over time, and for each individual relative to the average user. Saurabh will showcase how they’re able to do continuous online learning using simple but powerful perceptrons.

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  • Riddhi Mittal

    Riddhi Mittal

    Co-Founder at Finomena

    ML in fin-tech - Transforming 60 crore Indian lives

    For a traditional lender, the cost of sourcing, analysing, approving and servicing a loan for a Rs. 60,000 laptop is not worth the return. Riddi leads Finomena, where machine learning is used to its fullest extent to disrupt this calculation and provide access to credit for people in the long tail of India - over 60 crore. As in anything involving human behavior, risk assessment is extremely complex, but we’ll get a peek at the secret sauce - Finomena’s credit-scoring engine architecture.

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  • Udit Poddar

    Udit Poddar

    Data Scientist at SocialCops

    Data-Driven Decision Making in Indian Agriculture: the Present and the Future

    Data-driven decision making is critical in sectors like agriculture, health, and education where well-planned initiatives have the power to literally change lives. Lack of a consolidated platform with access to relevant data, however, hinders objectivity and efficiency in the decision making process for the decisions that matter most. Udit reveals how his team stitched previously siloed datasets together to help target investment decisions in agriculture.

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  • Nishant Bangarwa

    Nishant Bangarwa

    Business Intelligence team at Hortonworks

    Scalable Realtime Analytics using Druid

    When interacting with your phone or laptop, a smooth user experience requires a response time in the order of milliseconds. This is much harder for applications which need to handle arbitrarily complex queries on large data, such as those designed for business intelligence. So it’s important to select the right serving layer. Druid is one such, designed from scratch for OLAP queries. Nishant will demo, dissect and explain the motivation for using Druid as a data store.

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  • Rohit Gupta

    Rohit Gupta

    Technologist

    Logging at scale using Graylog - Billion+ messages, 100K req/sec

    With the advent of micro-services and dozens of releases per day, logs are the bread and butter for a real-time platform like OlaCabs. In this talk, Rohit will present their logging pipeline and provide an unexpurgated narrative of the challenges they faced while doing it at “Ola scale”.

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In addition to the talks, there will be three interactive Birds Of a Feather sessions on statistics, machine learning, and ‘alternative’ data. If you have questions or want to discuss applications, please join a BOF session of your choice.

Workshops

  • Martin Andrews

    Martin Andrews

    Managing Director at Cambridge Business Solutions Pte Ltd

    Advanced Deep Learning

    Deep Learning is a hot topic, but has a steep initial learning curve. This workshop is aimed at giving participants ‘hands-on’ experience of a range of deep learning techniques. While no prior deep learning knowledge is assumed, the content will not be watered down : even people already deploying models should find material that is new and interesting. Topics include anomaly detection, applying a pre-trained model to classify images into previously unseen classes, art 'style transfer', and reinforcement Learning inspired by AlphaGo.

    30 July 2016

    8:45 AM to 5 PM

    The Energy and Research Institute (TERI), Bangalore

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  • Bargava Subramanian and Amit Kapoor Bargava Subramanian and Amit Kapoor

    Bargava Subramanian and Amit Kapoor

    Data Scientist, Cisco Systems (Bargava); Crafting visual stories with data at narrativeVIZ (Amit)

    Math for Data Science

    Numerical literacy, including basic proficiency in math and stats, is a must for anyone pursuing a career in data science. The goal of this workshop is to introduce some key concepts that get used repeatedly in data science applications. The approach is what they call the “Hacker's way”. Instead of going back to formulae and proofs, Amit and Bargava teach the concepts by writing code. And in practical applications. Concepts don't remain sticky if the usage is never taught.

    30 July 2016

    8:45 AM to 5 PM

    91springboard, Bangalore

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  • Anand Chandrasekaran

    Anand Chandrasekaran

    CTO of Mad Street Den

    Deep learning for computer vision

    Anand will give a gentle introduction to the nuts and bolts of Deep Learning in computer vision, from neurons to networks. Get familiar with the entire spectrum of of usable networks, from RBMs to CNNs to RNNs, how they're used in computer vision, what works and what doesn't, and the fundamentals on training Deep Learning networks on existing frameworks as well as GPUs. Participants will have access to AWS ec2 GPU instances for training and testing.

    31 July 2016

    8:15 AM to 2:15 PM

    The Energy and Research Institute (TERI), Bangalore

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  • Nischal HP and Raghotham S Nischal HP and Raghotham S

    Nischal HP and Raghotham S

    Co-Founders, Unnati Data Labs

    Building a scalable data science platform using Luigi, Apache Spark, Pandas and Flask

    To ensure that the plumbing of a data pipeline will work in production at scale is both an art and a science. The science involves understanding the different tools and technologies needed to make the data pipeline connect, while the art involves making the trade-offs needed to tune the data pipeline so that it flows. In this workshop, you will learn how to build a scalable data science platform, set up and conduct data engineering using Pandas and Luigi, build a machine learning model with Apache Spark and deploy it as a predictive api with Flask.

    31 July 2016

    2:15 PM to 6 PM

    The Energy and Research Institute (TERI), Bangalore

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Conference Schedule

View Schedule

Testimonials

Fifth Elephant did something wonderfully positive for our Mad Street Den team. Between refreshing new lessons, business leads, potential hires and the sheer energy of the talent present at the conference, I think it was money & time well spent, even for an early stage startup as ours. We sent 11 members of our team including interns, and I'd do it all over again without thinking twice! This is the standard of discourse we should try and maintain across any conference or event we organize, these guys at HasGeek have a thing or two to teach the rest of our tech ecosystem.
Ashwini Asokan,
Co-founder of Mad Street Den

Very helpful, and very supportive! Any queries I had were quickly and clearly handled. The process of wiring up the speaker and connecting laptops was as good as the sound system and the video recording, all excellent.
Tim Poston,
Mathematician;
Chief Scientist, Therataxis LLC;
Research Scientist, Animoto.

The biggest call out of the HasGeek Fifthelephant conference is the talk selection process and diversity, richness of content in the talks. The second highlight is the post selection preparation of talks and mentoring for speakers.
The logistics of the conference itself - wifi, videos, communication etc is as good as it gets. Kudos to your guys for running such a high quality data conference overall.
Regunath Balasubramanian,
Principal Architect at Flipkart

Sponsors

HasGeek helps people in technology meet each other, collaborate on new opportunities and advance the state of the art. We organize conferences, hacknights, workshops and geekups, and provide tools for communities to self-organize.

We’ve created conferences around the themes of devops, front end engineering, Julia, big data and cloud computing, JavaScript and Android. Our Job Board is used by thousands of geeks every month to find new opportunities.

HasGeek is a technology company in the media business, bringing software automation to a traditionally people-intensive operation. Over the past six years, HasGeek has organized dozens of conferences attended by thousands of technology professionals, made several thousand connections, and built open source tools that are now used by many communities.

Credits

Editorial Panel: Ashwin Kumar, Govind Kanshi, Shailesh Kumar, Gopal V and Zainab Bawa. Special thanks to Amit Kapoor for mentoring, helping in talk rehearsals and BoFs and Bargava S for speaker outreach.

HasGeek Team: Anish TP, Beli Bopaiah, Hari C M, Jaya Lakshmi, Jyothsna Vinod, Kiran Jonnalagadda, Mak, Shreyas Satish, Vidya Ramakrishnan and Zainab Bawa.

A special thanks to all the volunteers. Abhimanyu M, Adarsh C, Aditya Kathpalia, Ashwin, Cherry, Fausya, Gautam, Giri Ram Mohan, Harish, Jessy, Kaushik, Mithun, Namrata, Pankaj, Praveen, Raghavendra A, Rahul, Rajeef, Ravigopal, Sai Charan, Sreechand Tavva, Syam, Trouble, Ujjwal and the team of Geekskool: Adarsh, Aditya, Akshar, Anusandhya, Ashish, Jayesh, Manisha , Mukesh, Priyanka, Rahul, Rhythm, Sankalp, Santosh Rajan, Sruti and Surbhi.

Code of Conduct

We strive to make our events friendly, safe and harassment‑free for all.

Please observe the code of conduct at the event.