User:CKoerner (WMF)/Notes from Strange Loop 2017

'The Strange Loop logo is not a mobius strip. This bothered some people.'

At the tail end of September I attended a yearly tech and community conference called Strange Loop. I was attending in my role at the foundation as an opportunity to learn more and discover new people and ideas to connect to.

Hosted in my hometown of St. Louis, MO USA the event was an opportunity to learn about emergent trends in the technology field. Topics were spread wide, from new programming languages, the intersection of art and technology, security best practices, to programmatic work to leverage technology for positive social change.

There were nine - yes NINE - tracks throughout the day, meaning any review will be woefully incomplete (this one especially). Out of all the sessions I attended, the general theme I walked away from the conference with was, "Machines. Are they real?".

Not an overly useful one-line summary. :) In earnest, this theme touches on the importance of using technology like machine learning and supportive programmatic resources to create things that amplify the abilities of all people.

Prior to attending I had heard great acclaim for the event. Looking at past, and even current, schedules gave me pause to attend. Many of the sessions appeared to lean heavily into seemingly purely technical presentations that appear to be beyond my own knowledge and interests. However, as emphasized this year by the organizers, the sessions were very diverse and approachable. As an example, the first session I attended was titled, "The Biological Path Toward Strong AI" (video). I know zilch about AI or the structure of the human brain. The presenter basically gave a "Neuroscience 101" session covering how the neurons in our brains work and how we might be able to programmatically understand how the coding works to generate artificial intelligence. While a topic I had personal curiosity toward, I was prepared for a deeply academic approach to the subject. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood and the skill of the presenter in approaching the subject without assuming prior knowledge.

General organizational notes
The event was well-organized with plenty of pre-event communication and documentation. All sessions were listed on the website in advance, each with a short description of the talk and its location within the venues. Having the talks in two venues, each nearly 3 city blocks away from one another and with only 20 minutes of time between each created a feeling of, "Eh, maybe I'll just stay here and settle for a different talk".

Given that food is 90% of the reason to either greatly enjoy or deride a conference, I was pleasantly surprised that the food options were well-prepared and catered to those with explicit dietary needs. They even served some of my favorite cliché local dishes, like toasted ravioli and gooey butter cake - making what could have been a rather generic event feel very St. Louisian.

Music was present at the event with a custom playlist of music created to fill the space between sessions. It was not too loud, but was a nice addition to create a warm feeling. I also enjoy discovering new music and found a few new tracks.

The evening before the event, attendees were welcomed to a social gathering at the City Museum, a pretty unique local attraction. Snacks and drinks were provided. Riot Games, who have offices in St. Louis, hosted a boardgames room. I arrived a little early and was able to chat with a non-technical staff member. Their technical operation dwarfs that of the Wikimedia Foundation by a magnitude of 10x. Curiously, as I talked with the staff member, they expressed that Riot staff have a rather competitive streak. The voracity and seriousness of the games played betrayed this truth. All in good fun, of course. A similar, albeit different kind of folk than what I have experience working with at the Foundation and in the wider movement. However, I haven't yet had a serious round of Dominion with anyone yet. :)

Videos of all recorded sessions were professionally produced and available on YouTube hours after the event. Keynote presentations (of which there were four(!)) and all sessions in the largest space were also live captioned, with the captions available to read immediately afterward. Slides of each presentation were also shared.

A great divergent mix of people were represented in both the session presenters and the attendees. This created a great opportunity to meet and hear from people not like me and learn from their experiences - both in the technology field and in general.

The event had a Code of Conduct and photo policy. An interesting idea that was utilized was having a duty officer available at all times at the registration table in the main lobby. They stood out by not only having a specific role separate from the rest of the organizers and volunteers in helping attendees feel safe, but also by their easily identifiable orange shirt.

I made a light-hearted bet with a friend on how long it would be until a session mentioned a Wikimedia project. The first keynote was about long-tail optimization. The research was run on a dataset of English Wikipedia articles. Apparently the time-to-first-Wikimedia is zero at Strange Loop.

Sessions I attended
As mentioned, there were too many tracks and interesting sessions within to be able to attend them all. Here's a small collection of the sessions I did attend with some notes for each. Links to the videos are included where possible and I encourage you to watch them all or browse the schedule to find one you'll undoubtedly enjoy.

Friday
Measuring and Optimizing Tail Latency (video) - Kathryn McKinley

The opening keynote jumped straight into the deep end of nerdy. McKinley discussed 99th percentile response time (often called long tail) response times in web applications. The optimizations she presented were insightful and novel - given my basic understanding of optimization techniques. It was interesting to learn the history of server optimization following a stark trend of trying to be as energy-efficient as possible given the scale at which large websites operate. A positive for the environment, scalability, and accessibility to services.

The Biological Path Towards Strong AI (video) - Matt Taylor

Matt is the community manager for a company that produces open-source projects around the concept of Hierarchical Temporal Memory. HTM is a way of developing machine intelligence that is based upon how human brains, particularly the neocortex, are structured. As I mentioned in the introduction, his presentation was very much a "Neuroscience 101" for how the cortex is structured and communicates. His presentation was dynamic with great visuals and a narrative that drew you into the topic. I learned about how the cortex encodes semantics and uses spatial pooling to share inputs by grouping them together. It was enlightening to learn how similar our cortex and computer systems really are. I found it humorous that his visual representation of the column structure in a neuron looks very much like an icon for a database. The model for temporal memory reminded me of early phone operator switch boards, with multiple connections across columns.

This Cruise Ship can Fly: Bringing Hackathons to the Philadelphia Museum of Art - Laura Webb

Arguably one of the most passionate sessions and encouraging for any cultural organization wanting to increase awareness of their institutions and collections by working with open-technology communities. Webb talked about her experiences in advocating, organizing, and leading hackathons at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's not easy but her guidance is incredibly useful for moving any starchy organizations toward openness. I have aspirations with following up with the presenter to see if there is an opportunity to connect her with the local Wikimedia community in Philadelphia, or perhaps with the Wikimedia developer community for future events.

"It Me": Under the Hood of Web Authentication (video) - Yan Zhu and Garrett Robinson

After this session I wanted to change all my passwords - again - just out of the fear that security practices across every conceivable vector are incomplete. The presenters covered a few recent occurrences of data leaks (like with Adobe) and shared research on common password phrases, the notable lack of dedicated security review in many open source projects (like the very popular Node.js until recently), and best practices for being smart in managing authentication in web applications. One of the most remarkable parts of the presentation was when they described the use of timing differences in MAC tag comparisons to detect if a guessed password was close to being correct. By detecting how quickly a match (or mismatch if using brute-force methods) was returned, you could detect a password match. We're talking about detecting nanoseconds over the network to crack passwords. Crazy.

Narrated Reality (video) - Ross Goodwin

This was a fun session. Goodwin warped the meaning of written language with creative uses of neural networks, natural language processing, and bots. It wasn't until the second half of his presentation that I realized I was familiar with his work, particularly the short film Sunspring, completely written by software trained on science-fiction screenplays.

After the session I was able to ask Ross a question. My question was, "In the course of your presentation you went from early projects of human-written and machine-curated experiments to your more recent work involving machine-written and human-curated creations. Are there ways of detecting if a body of text is machine-written or human-written? Is it art if something is written by a machine instead of a human? Does it matter?

Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word (video) - Allison Parrish

Thus far at Strange Loop there was a severe lack of poetry. But not with Parrish's session! Another session that challenged the concept of writing and meaning, Parrish described her experiments in deconstructing the meaning of text. One of the best parts of the talk was when Parrish parsed the text from a novel to surface its inherent color. Dracula is brown mush. Yeah.

The Future is Now (video) - Rachel White

White's discussion of bringing the fiction of the cyberpunk genre of fiction into reality - today - was a stark reminder of the accessibility of biohacking and transhumanism. If that's your thing, the future truly is now. Get to hacking. There was a severed robot head and hand on the stage the entire presentation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To Serve The People: Public Interest Technologists (video) - Matt Mitchell

The ending keynote for the first day, Mitchell's presentation focused on encouraging, and then listing at length, the various opportunities that exist to participate in the technology field for positive social change. It was a whirlwind journey of encouragement. He spoke of the idea of "public interest technologists" and the path that is now, more than ever, emergent. You can both work with technology in a fulfilling technical career and having a significant social impact in communities. If you find yourself lacking in enthusiasm in the work you are doing now and want to do something potentially more meaningful, watch Mitchell's presentation.

Saturday
Rebuilding the Cathedral (video) - Nadia Eghbal

This presentation is a must-watch for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of open-source projects and their participation. The title of the presentation is a riff off of the popular The Cathedral and the Bazaar essay that describes the engineering methods of Linux, a large, popular open-source project. The fallacy, as Eghbal, claims, is that most open-source projects don't just magically work like the Bazaar model proposes. Users don't become contributors, without effort. Eghbal presents some possible reasons for why this model doesn't work and suggestions for supporting projects in a healthy way. Eghbal's report for the Ford Foundation on the unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure is also suggested reading.

Related: The Maintainers. "A thought network focused on maintenance, repair, upkeep, and the mundane labor that keeps the world going." Their tagline: "Keeping technology working, at least some of the time".

Wait, it does ??tahW: How supporting Right-to-Left can expose your bad UX decisions (video) - Moriel Schottlender

Wikimedia's very own Moriel Schottlender walked folks though the importance of supporting RTL languages. Not only for the smart inclusion of those languages but to expose inconsistencies in how you present content and interface together. It was remarkable to learn of the enormous effort our developers have put into supporting languages, and the numerous inconsistencies in products we use every day. I'm looking at you Facebook.

Alice's Adventures in Artificial Intelligence-land (video) - Coraline Ada Ehmke

Alice is a bot, a playful, generative one. Ehmke discussed her own development as a technologist and her history of developing chat bots that simulate human behavior. Starting with her time in the early Internet in MUSH environments to the more recent development of Alice, a Slack bot with a growing understanding of the world. Ehmke's presentation was charming and encouraging - and also one of the best designed, with great playful typography and Alice in Wonderland illustrations. Go play! "He who makes a start has half the work done - Horace"

How to Play with Deep Space Data (video) - Lisa Ballard

A great overview of resources to search, view, and manipulate deep space imagery. Also, more poetry. I enjoyed the rogue aspect as Ballard described using undocumented APIs to get to the data she knew existed, but wasn't documented or presented publicly. A little bit of white hat subterfuge. Go play with data.nasa.gov and in particular the Data Search for Outer Planets NASA Mission Data (OPUS). Key to the City: Writing Code to Induce Social Change (video) - Jurnell Cockhren

An interesting session that I think is more inspiring than practical, Cockhren walks through a popular social concern and describes a solution as being comparable as a NP problem. While I think the methodologies are a little more complicated, I appreciated the attempt to break down a complex and 'soft' concept like social justice into something the more hard nosed in the audience might find familiar and therefor approachable. Closing Keynote (transcript) - Adam Savage

Co-host of the popular show MythBusters, Savage talked a about his own journey finding his place in the world. He spoke openly of his belief in the power of the 'talking cure' and his own struggles with mental health. The presentation was punctuated with humor and very engaging. The end point (read the transcript) is to teach yourself and others about failure, be okay with it, and understand the the path from here to there is ever-winding. After his presentation the host of Strange Loop, Alex Miller, took to the stage with Adam for a Question and Answer session. Attendees were able to suggest questions during the conference in preparation. I was fortunate enough to have my question picked and Adam answered it in a thoughtful and unexpected way. My question was, "What one thing from science fiction would you like to see in reality?". His answer was a brief summary of the novel Seveneves, in which humanity returns to Earth after its destruction and 5,000 year rejuvenation, only to be skeptical of technology like smartphones and social media. The skepticism is the one thing he'd like to see more of in our reality.

Fun side story to his presentation. Savage was a victim of an attempted phishing attack - mere hours before going on stage. While he came out unscathed, it was both horrifying from a security perspective and humorous to hear him recollect the mental steps he went through in the process.

Sessions I wanted to see, but did not

 * The Truth About Mentoring Minorities (video) - Byron Woodfork - I think this would would be useful in light of Technical Collaborations initiatives to increase volunteer developer participation in our movement.
 * Tuning Elasticsearch for English-Language Precision (video) - Erin McKean - Jokingly, this is about 100% the opposite of the current efforts of the search backend team. We're wanting to make elasticsearch work better for all the other languages than English. :)
 * Death of the Trusted Internet (video) - Marianne Bellotti - A rather dystopian sounding title, but with hope as the fact that we're sharing and talking about the subject shows promise!
 * The Security of Classic Game Consoles (video) - Kevin Shekleton - I like video games.

People I want to connect with further

 * Laura Webb - hackathons in Philly and sharing her tips with organizers in our movement
 * Nadia Eghbal - We spoke briefly after her keynote and I would like to talk more about her own findings and that of her colleague from Carnegie Mellon University in researching developer participation. Perhaps even seeing if they would be interested in presenting at a Wikimedia event about the subject.
 * Matt Mitchell and the numerous resources he listed seem like a great list of similar organizations that members of our movement could benefit from.