[mlpack] NumFOCUS summit report and ideas

[Ryan Curtin]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2019 at 01:37:16PM -0500, Marcus Edel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> > mlpack video meetings:
> 
> What about we create a shared document (e.g. google docs) and use that to manage
> the meetings, if someone has a particular question or topic they like to discuss
> they can write it down before the meeting. This allows us to prepare for certain
> topics. We can also keep track of what was discussed in the meetings.

That sounds good to me if you want to set it up; alternately we can just
send an email to the list beforehand and people could respond to it with
ideas.  Either is fine honestly.

> > giving talks on mlpack:
> > 
> > mlpack talks/workshops - this is a very good point. I've been doing some of this
> > and it really pays off. The amount of user conversion you get by doing this is
> > superior to opportunistic discoveries of the library. And I truly believe we
> > need more users and more engagement. After all, that's why we build mlpack,
> > right? I would add that we also need talks and workshops that are *not* super
> > technical. For new users (consumers of the library I mean), metaprogramming is
> > not really attractive. Instead, these users are looking forward a
> > simple-useful-easy "Hello World" that delivers instantaneous value. Take a look
> > at scikit-learn for instance, it's all about examples and ready to consume
> > snippets.
> 
> Agreed, maybe we can put a list together with events (local/global) as a
> starting point.

Sounds good---I'll see if I can compile a list of events I'm interested
in in the near future and we can share it here or somewhere.

> > C++ notebooks:
> 
> I have a setup running that I can make accessible, Sylvain used Binder, which
> has some limitations like 1-2GB of memory, kernel shutdown after 10 minutes of
> inactivity. If I'm thinking about running neural network examples, we might run
> into the mentioned limitations.

Sounds good---we can also use some of mlpack.org's resources for this,
and NumFOCUS might be able to help with the resources also via
connections to large companies or something?  I'm not sure.

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "Wha' happened?"
ryan at ratml.org |   - Mike LaFontaine