Today's post is slightly off-track. I was invited to the first Fast.AI unconference in Brisbane, Queensland this week. It was an honor to be part of the community and I'm having a blast meeting with so many brilliant AI researchers around the globe! In short, UnConferences are "unconventional conferences". Anyone can propose an agenda, organize a session to any topics they want.

There will be three rooms. The event is a semi-organised unconference. The nature of the sessions is determined by those attending the unconference, however, we're interested broadly in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and related fields, but with a particular focus on:

Part of creating a welcoming community infrastructure is their yearly unconference. At the unconference, about 60 invited R users from around the world get together to work on small projects that are relevant to the R community at the time. Project ideas are collected and discussed in Github issues during the weeks before the unconference but the final decision which projects will be worked on is made by the participants on the first morning of the unconference. This year's rOpenSci unconference was held at the Microsoft Reactor in Seattle. The whole organizing team - most and foremost Stefanie Butland - did a wonderful job hosting this event. Everybody made sure that the spirit of the unconference was inclusive and very welcoming to everybody, from long-established fixtures in the R-world to newbies and anyone in between.