Hello NuPIC team. The hackathon is over, and overall I think it turned out great. Here are some of my thoughts about it. I welcome any of your feedback as well. I want to make these events as high-quality as possible for those attending as well as people watching online.
Thanks to all of you who managed to come to the event, as well as everyone who helped with the setup and tear-down. What Went Well ============= Great turnout, all attendees were courteous and inquisitive. There was a lot of wonderful discussion and networking. Ideas were definitely flowing freely between everyone. There was a high level of excitement and anticipation for the underlying technology and what the future holds for NuPIC. The hacks that were produced from the event were creative and impressive. Every time we put on a hackathon, it's like a "shot in the arm" for the whole community. It expresses what is possible with NuPIC and injects a dose of imagination into the community. The Tagged facility, for the most part, worked out really well. It was more than big enough, and the wifi was quite good. The area of the city was really nice, too. I think the catering was also very good. The food was diverse and there was more than enough for everyone. Thanks to Teri and Casey for all their help with that. Some Problems ============= While I spent a lot of my time before the hackathon buying, experimenting, and testing A/V equipment with an intention of live-streaming everything possible, most of the videos of the event on YouTube are poor quality. The lighting in Tagged at night was very bad, and I didn't bring any external lights. Our wireless mics failed during the event, which caused awful audio on several videos, and I didn't have a backup for them. Because the A/V setup within Tagged was completely separate from my system, we had to use two mics for presenters and audience questions (one for speakers within the venue, one for streaming audio to YouTube). The IPCams I bought for the event could not be used in the Tagged venue because their network prohibited peer-to-peer IP connections. This also affected some of the hacks. I had to rely on webcams that where physically tethered to the A/V control laptop for most of the video. Google Hangouts turned out to be really difficult to setup for the presentations. I had to ensure that the presenter was connected and sharing their screen appropriately, and several times the presenter would accidentally disconnect from the Hangout and need to be invited back in to continue. I also had one video that just didn't stream to YouTube, so it was lost forever. I still don't know what I did wrong. There were also times where the video quality was choppy, especially during some crucial points in the demos. This was unfortunate. There were still some issues getting NuPIC installed and running in different environments. Our VM was not updated and tested properly. Major feedback included that it should contain a checkout of NuPIC that is already tested and ready to run out of the box. Some community members have posted new tools working towards this. We also need to better document the different ways of installing NuPIC from scratch (with or without dependencies included). Many people were confused by this. Options to Correct the Problems ========================= I'm considering NOT live-streaming for the next event in order to provide better A/V without the complications of using Google Hangout (which enables a live YouTube stream). We didn't have an overwhelming number of people actually viewing the videos live, anyway. I thought it would be better for archival purposes to provide better quality videos by sacrificing live-streaming. I'm looking for feedback on this option. This would also prevent remote participation in the hackathon by online attendees, but we didn't have any remote hacks at this event anyway. I'm also going to be purchasing more professional A/V equipment now that I've learned some important lessons after this event. The next event will no-doubt be better just from a few simple provisions planned ahead of time. This includes an audio recorder to preserve interesting conversations that happen ad-hoc, and a more professional video camera with a decent onboard microphone. After the event, I can splice together much higher quality videos using these tools. We also need to update the official VM for NuPIC consistently. Unfortunately with all the Grok product work in the weeks leading up to the hackathon, we weren't able to dedicate proper resources to this endeavor. I hope we can remedy this, and perhaps create some form of automation that builds a VM with NuPIC and runs tests against it as a part of our integration pipeline (which doesn't actually exist yet). I'm still very excited about this community and our project. The next hackathon will be planned soon, and we're going to continue to make them better and bigger as the NuPIC community evolves and expands. Thanks again to everyone who participated and helped make this happen! Regards, --------- Matt Taylor OS Community Flag-Bearer Numenta _______________________________________________ nupic mailing list [email protected] http://lists.numenta.org/mailman/listinfo/nupic_lists.numenta.org
