Matt - Thank you for putting on a great event. It was easily the best hackathon I have attended this year. I am still learning about NuPIC and the CLA, so I did not end up making a hack, but the event was a huge benefit to me because of all that learned and was exposed to. I hope to attend next year and be familiar enough with the platform to build a hack.
Thanks also to Jeff Hawkins and the entire Grok team for being so helpful and inspiring. The event got me really fired up! Regarding the issue of live-streaming vs recording the event: I think recording and then posting video is fine if that allows for higher quality videos - whatever produces the best end result, since the archival value is probably higher than the need for telepresence. A rock-solid VM for NuPIC would be really terrific, even if it lags a bit behind the latest Grok builds. I understand that maintaining that VM can be a resource drain on the Grok staff though. I am wondering if there is a volunteer team dedicated to maintaining such a thing? If not, perhaps some people from the community could help here? I would be happy to help out here if I am able. - Jeff F. On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Matthew Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
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