Inductive Bias

Disclaimer: Intentionally posting on my private blog - these are my own criteria, not general advice from the review committee.

Berlin Buzzwords is in it’s fourth year. Probably the most tedious task of all is having to select talks to make it into the final schedule. With roughly 120 submissions and roughly 30 slots to fill the result is that three quarters of all submissions have to be rejected. Last year I shared some details on how we do talk ranking given reviewers have provided their input.

Now the mechanics of ranking are clear, people have asked me what goes into the reviews themselves. Here I can only speak for myself: After doing reviews ourselves during the first two years, Simon, Jan and myself decided to spread the work of reviewing submissions among a larger team of people. As nearly all of them had attended Berlin Buzzwords in the past already (or had at least followed the conference remotely) we could assume they were roughly familiar with what kind of content would be a good fit. As a result review guidelines that we send out tend to be rather light:

Berlin Buzzwords is a conference from geeks for geeks: The goal is to get the people actively working in the field together to meet and exchange ideas. Content should have some technical depth - in particular pure marketing talks and obvious product placements without further technical value are not welcome. We usually invite both, interesting case studies as well as talks highlighting the technical details a project is built upon.

In the end judgement is up to the individual reviewer - so I can speak only for myself when listing what you should do to get your talk accepted.

• Be on topic. There’s always a handful of submissions that look and sound like pure marketing, product placement or simply aren’t related to software engineering at all. Those tend to be easy to spot and weed out.
• Tell us what you are talking about. An abstract is there to provide some detail on your presentation - don’t be just funny, promising overly generic content. In order to decide whether or not your talk is relevant please provide some details on which direction you’ll be heading.
• Don’t be too detailed in the abstract neither - there’s no need to list the content of every slide. Make sure the abstract correctly summarizes your talk, making it catchy and nice to read usually helps if the content is solid.
• We try to find those speakers that have not only an interesting topic to talk about but are also a pleasure to listen to, who can successfully get their point across. We cannot know every potential speaker in person though. As a result it helps if you list which conferences you’ve spoken at in the past, any videos of previous talks is helpful as well. As a general piece of advice: Choosing Berlin Buzzwords as your first conference to speak at ever usually is a great way to disaster. Get some practice at local meetups like the Berlin Hadoop Get Together, the data science day, the Java User Group Berlin Brandenburg, the RecSys Stammtisch Berlin or the MongoDB User Group Berlin to name just a few.
• Make sure your talk is novel - submitting the same topic in 2012 and 2013 is a great way to ensure getting rejected. Also it is fine to submit a talk you have given at another conference earlier. However if everyone in the Buzzwords audience is very likely to have watched the exact same version of your presentation earlier already, we are less likely to accept your talk.
• Finally: When drafting your bio make sure to include details that explain why you are the perfect expert to talk about the topic at hand. As much as I’d like to I don’t know every project’s committer by name. Provide some help by pointing out explicitly what your contributions have been or in what context you have used the technology you are presenting. Don’t be shy to list that you are a co-founder of a successful project. Not only does this information help with selecting talks, it also provides some background for the audience to judge the claims you make.

Two words on the role of free software at Buzzwords: There is no explicit requirement to only talk about software that is publicly available under a free software license however if some project or framework is presented it helps to be open source to raise the applicability for the audience. Most projects discussed at Berlin Buzzwords are developed openly. In order to get the maximum out of these projects it pays to know how they work internally, how to get active yourself, how to contribute. As a result discussions and talks on project governance are generally welcome.

A parting note: With way more than half of all submissions to reject making a final decision will always be hard. Being rejected doesn’t necessarily mean that your proposal was bad. Following the above advise may raise chances of being accepted - however it is no guarantee. We could raise the number of accepted talks by extending the conference by another track or even another day - at the cost of raising the ticket price substantially. However we want not only “big corp representatives” but a diverse audience, attendees that get active themselves, that help shape the conference:

• Get active on stage at our Sunday evening Buzzwords Barcamp
• Provide introductory content to those entering the field at our weekend Open Tech School trainings
• Present your favorite topic on our Open Stage during the main conference days.
• Host workshops, hacking lessons or a bug squashing party at our interactive program during the main conference days.
• Organise or give a talk at one of our After-conference hackathons, workshops, meetups

There’s plenty of space and time to get active in addition to the main conference program. Use the time and space to shape the conference.

Berlin Buzzwords, Uncategorized Berlin Buzzwords, review, talk selection

The clock is ticking - only one more weekend to go before Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors for the main conference (check out the Wiki for the Sunday evening Barcamp and the Sunday Movie Hackday). Looking forward to an amazing week with awesome speakers and great attendees.

One word of warning before: Given all the buzz around that conference as of now until mid-next week I won’t take any major decisions, most likely I won’t be able to follow through with any additional organisation, probably I won’t remember everyone I meet on-site.

In case I do take decisions - don’t trust any of them. If you do need help organising some meetup or dinner - I’m happy to help out with recommendations on where to go and who to ask, I’m also happy to get you in touch with people relevant to your area of interest. However when it comes to selecting the restaurant, deciding on the day and time, booking a table and informing everyone involved you are on your own. In case you have any questions, requests or advise please make sure to send a copy to my inbox to make sure it will be dealt with (though it might take some time for me to get back to today’s inbox zero level I’ll make sure I’ll get through all of it).

Other than that - thanks to ntc and Nick the Barcamp is all setup, the conference is well on track, thanks to many external helping hands we’ve again got a convincing line-up of satellite events. In addition I made sure the Apache Mahout people got a time and place to meet, I managed to review all proposals that sounded interesting at Strata London (great stuff on the business side of big data - go there if you want to learn more on the business side of the topics covered by Berlin Buzzwords and more). Everything else will have to wait at least until end next week.

CU in Berlin - bring sun and warm weather with you

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords

Update: Seems like there won’t be any airport changes for Berlin Buzzwords: German article at Tagesspiegel on postponing airport opening.

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If you are planning to travel to Berlin in June – e.g. to attend Berlin Buzzwords – note that there is a major change to airports happening on June 2nd:

Saturday, June 2nd will be the last day, both Schönefeld Airport (SXF) as well as Tegel Airport (TXL) are going to be open. All planes departing TXL that day will arrive at SXF in the evening.

The morning after (Sunday, June 3rd) airport Berlin Brandenburg International (also known as BBI, IATA code BER) is going to open. This airport is located very close to Schönefeld, there will be trains and busses connecting it to the city.

Airlines should handle this change transparently. However when arriving at TXL make sure to check which airport you are departing from to avoid ending up in front of closed doors Also should you be arriving from the US keep in mind that there will be a few more direct connections to Berlin starting June 3rd – e.g. Air Berlin will offer multiple daily flights to and from New York and Miami.

When travelling from the airport to the conference by public transport, keep in mind that for TXL you only need a ticket covering zones A and B – for SXF and BER your need to purchase a ticket that is valid for zones A, B and C.

Travelling from TXL to the conference venue and speaker hotel by cab is roughly 30 Euros. For BER the fare is roughly 50 Euros.

Berlin Buzzwords airport, Berlin Buzzwords

As of beginning of last week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is online. The Program Committee has
completed reviewing all submissions and set up the schedule containing a great lineup of speakers for this years Berlin Buzzwords program. Among the speakers we have Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat), Alex Lloyd (Google), Michael Busch (Twitter) as well as Nicolas Spiegelberg (Facebook). Checkout our program in the online schedule.

Berlin Buzzwords standard conference tickets are still available. Note that we also offer a special rate for groups of 5 and more attendees with a 15% discount off the standard ticket price. Make sure to book your ticket now: Ticket prizes will rise by another 100 Euros for last minute purchases in three weeks!

“Berlin Buzzwords is by far one of the best conferences around if you care about search, distributed systems, and NoSQL…” says Shay Banon, founder of ElasticSearch.

Berlin Buzzwords will take place June 4th and 5th 2012 at Urania Berlin. The 3rd edition of the conference for developers and users of open source projects, again focuses on everything related to scalable search, data-analysis in the cloud and NoSQL-databases. We are bringing together developers, scientists, and analysts working on innovative technologies for storing, analysing and searching today’s massive amounts of digital data.

Berlin Buzzwords is organised by newthinking communications GmbH in collaboration with Isabel Drost (Member of the Apache Software Foundation, PMC member Apache community development and co-founder of Apache Mahout), Jan Lehnardt (PMC member Apache CouchDB) and Simon Willnauer (Member of the Apache Software Foundation, PMC member Apache Lucene).

More information including speaker interviews, ticket sales, press information as well as “meet me at bbuzz” buttons are available on the official Berlin Buzzwords website.

Looking forward to meeting you in June.

PS: Did I mention that Berlin is all beautiful in Summer?

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene

A little bit of inspiration on what to do the weekend before and after Buzzwords in Berlin:

• Ballet in June at the Staatsballett Berlin
• Concerts in June at Konzerthaus Berlin
• Opera in June at Staatsoper Berlin
• Opera in June at Deutsche Oper Berlin
• Concerts in June at the Philharmoniker Berlin
• Opera in June at Komische Oper Berlin
• Theater (German-only, sorry, but open-air) at Hexenkessel Hoftheater
• A summary of what else is available on Berlin stages in June: Berliner Bühnen
• Opera and ballet in Dresden in June at Semper Oper Dresden
• Concerts in Leipzig at Gewandhaus Leipzig (select June as month, interface isn’t restful unfortunately)

With just a tiny bit of luck there is no need to pre-book your tickets - in most cases there are several seats left even an hour before the official starting time. Pre-ordering tickets does have an advantage though when it comes to prizing. One easy way to get your ticket it to book via
Eventim.

If you happen to be younger than thirty consider buying yourself a Classic Card - it costs 15 Euros but allows you access to several locations for 8 Euros only (no pre-booking, tickets can be purchased only an hour before the official start).

Berlin Buzzwords, Relocating to Berlin bbuzz, Berlin Buzzwords

Since roughly a week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is available online. Tickets are still available at the regular rate - make sure to book your ticket now - you’ve got another three weeks to purchase tickets at the regular rate, last minute rate will up the prize by another 100 Euros starting May 20th.

I thought it might be interesting to share some background on how Berlin Buzzwords scheduling worked out this year. We changed it quite a bit - adding more people to the conference committee, upping the acceptance rate while at the same time reducing speaking time for quite a few talks. This is to share some background information on some of the reasons and provide some detail on how rating was done.

Let me first state some constraints:

• We are hosting the conference in a venue where we can have 3 tracks at most - there aren’t any other large rooms. We don’t want to do another round of well- or rather not-so-well-informed random guessing of which talks will be un-popular stashing them in the small room. Switching schedule during the conference itself really isn’t particularly professional nor is it very simple to do when you have to move about 200 people around to have them go to a different room than what the printed schedule says.
• We are trying to keep the prize for the conference as low as possible to be able to attract the average developer who is not able to pay some 1.5k Euros to go to a conference. We are tech focused, no business involved - our attendees don’t have big budgets for travelling to expensive conferences. With current attendee numbers for each day every attendee has to pay roughly 50% of the current regular ticket prize to make the budget work out. That means two things: a) We need all of you to pay for all days to make the budget work. b) If you would like to add another conference day because talks are so interesting, add another 50% of the current ticket prize and decide whether you’d be willing to pay that extra money. c) Increasing the number of tracks obviously means increasing the ticket prize which we would rather avoid.
• Berlin Buzzwords was established as an event for professionals - quality of talks is high, attendees joining the conference know what they are talking about, we are happy to have students as well (did you notice there’s a student ticket?) However that focus means that we are different from pure-open-source-community events. If you think there is too few coverage on scalability topics at existing community-only events please talk to them to increase that coverage or lead the effort of establishing such an event yourself - that isn’t easy, but neither is it impossible. You could get started by hosting one of our meetups/workshops/hackathons - or alternatively run e.g. one of FOSDEM’s DevRooms.
• Buzzwords is organised by a team of several people. On the one hand there are volunteers (as in people not making a profit from the conference, working on it during working hours donated by their employer at best - Thank You Nokia**! Thank You Searchworkings!). They are familiar with what’s going on in the search/store/scale space - you can find them on the program committee page. All administrative work is being done by newthinking communications - they have people very dedicated to what they are doing (there’s even one girl who joined a Ruby-On-Rails getting started course last weekend to learn more on what Buzzwords people are working on*) - their main focus is that the whole conference runs as smoothly as possible.

Some of the assumptions above mean that we have to limit the number of talks we accept. Acceptance rate of last year was roughly 30%. Doing that again this year would have meant sending out decline mails to quite a few vital developers - many of them committers on the project they were talking about. That’s not because the talks were bad or anything, it’s just that there were way too many good talks. So we did an experiment this year: We upped that acceptance rate to 50% - but in turn had to reduce the length of many of the talks that were submitted as 40min versions. The result was that in order to fit more talks into the same space and time we had to shorten quite a few submissions. I did a bit of math this morning, of those reduced to 20min we would have had to reject 70% had we gone with a different schedule format w/o shortening submissions.

Talks selection was done according to a very simple algorithm:

Each talk was reviewed by at least three members of our program committee. Talk to reviewer assignment was done according to a pseudo random number generator - more precisely this one. Reviewers assigned scores ranging from 5 (want to have and am going to fight for it) to 1 (don’t want to see and am going to fight against). After looking at the schedule constraints we decided to accept n talks in total, x of which would be 40min, y of which would be 30 and z of which would be 20.

We sorted all talks by mean score and selected the top n for acceptance. Of those we took the first x/3 tagged as search, x/3 tagged as scale and x/3 from store to be accepted as 40 min talks. Same was done for the 30 and for the 20min slots. A mixture sort, grep, awk, head, and cut was quite helpful here and gave us n - 2 talks accepted. In our list of scores the following 5 talks had equal score, so we chose 2 of those at (pseudo-) random. Finally acceptance notification were sent out (Thanks to the Python mail support - that made things easier!). We asked speakers to confirm that they would still be available. Most got back right away, about 12 needed another nag mail or sms a week later to actually confirm.

Scheduling itself was done in a purely analog way: Take a pen, write all n talks on little pieces of paper, add information on track and length. After that those pieces of paper were arranged into the pre-defined schedule grid on a kitchen table: Re-arranging paper is just so much faster than anything you can do digitally - if only it wasn’t for the creation of post-it notes beforehand

Finally the schedule went out earlier this week - together with an appropriate press release, tweet etc. Again Buzzwords is a two day only conference. Most likely we won’t grow the main conference beyond that any time soon. However in effect you yourself can extend that conference to any length you want. We have asked local companies to provide us with meeting space for at least 20 people each for free. We have several community members organise workshops, meetups, hackathons, code-retreats and barcamps in these areas already. If you think your topic is not covered well enough at the main conference, you’d like to learn more on a particular topic - please talk to us on how to organise one of those meetups yourself. You don’t need to talk there if you don’t want to - all you need to do is get an interesting schedule together that draws people to your meetup. Also if you think your talk should have been accepted - talk to us to get a meetup going on your topic and related themes to get them covered.

The main goal of Berlin Buzzwords is to involve you. We are very open to any ideas on how to collaborate or grow the conference. We do have several partner events throughout Europe this year. We offer companies the option to co-located and co-promote their trainings after Buzzwords. We offer community members the option to co-locate and co-promote their meetup with the conference. However we do need your time and dedication to make this work. Or to use a phrase that is well-known at least in the Apache world: Patches welcome!

* Her conclusion: Even w/o prior coding knowledge the course was easy enough to follow and at least made clear to her the difference between frontend and backend work. Observation: Buzzwords is very clearly backend.

** In particular Hannes Kruppa and the whole search recommendations team!

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords

I’ve heard of several people who are not quite sure yet whether they should visit Berlin Buzzwords or not - in particular when having to travel far and cross 9 time zones to attend. My general recommendation is to plan to spend some more days in Europe. The conference is conveniently scheduled on Monday and Tuesday which gives you one weekend before to explore the city and the whole week afterwards to go and see more either in the city or around.

In case you are wondering whether the city is a worthy destination when travelling with children - below is a list of things to do and places to go I sent to someone recently. Hope it helps with your decision as well. In general the city is pretty green, there are several locations specially amenable to a visit with kids - so treat the list below as what it is: An incomplete listing of some of the most obvious locations that might be of interest collected by someone who knows a few parents and their children. Also in case you speak German make sure to check out one of the many guide books for Berlin with children available in local book stores - Dussmann and Hugendubel generally have the largest selection though Chatwins is my preferred one for anything about travelling.

In the city

In case of good weather:

• Tierpark Berlin - make sure you visit Tierpark (not Zoo) - it’s much larger and friendlier. See also images taken by Berlin Buzzwords fotographer Philipp, general images.

• There is a huge park in walking distance of Brandenburger Tor: Tiergarten for recreation after sight seeing.
• For swimming head over to either Wannsee or Schlachtensee
• For exploring a NSA listening station head west to Teufels-berg
• On warm evenings plan for some time at Maybachufer

For bad weather:

• If your kids like tech go to Technik Museum (it features one of the first computer (the one built by Zuse that is))

• If you kids like nature go to Naturkunde Museum
• If you are interested in science - make sure to be here for the long night of science (web page may need google translate unless you speak German.)
• For a city tour check out the following scribbles - they also include some interesting parts of the bus line 100 and 200

Close to the city:

If you have some more time to spend make sure you also explore the closer surroundings:

• 80km north: rent a canoo and explore Mecklenburg
• 200km north: visit Rügen, spend some time swimming, some time to see the amazing chalk cliffs, some time to see the isle by bike
• 250km south: go hiking or rafting in Elbsandsteingebirge
• 80km south: rent a canoo and explore the canals in Spreewald

Recommendations from friends

• Dawid Weiss: Badeschiff - a pool-on-the-river thing. It’s not something you get in any ordinary city
• Steve Loughran: My son’s favourite part of a trip to berlin (age 9) was actually the Bauspielplatz: Smaller kids get a play area where they can use the sand + water to build streams, dam them and generally make a mess, while the 8+ get a playground where they actually help build it under adult supervision. They also run a good open air waffle/pancake/coffee shop. They’re open in the afternoons.

Hope to see you in Berlin in June. If you need more information or recommendations don’t hesitate to ask.

Berlin Buzzwords, Relocating to Berlin Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, ostsee, paddeln, ruegen, Spreewald, vacation

The countdown started several weeks ago - finally in the past days the date for Berlin Buzzwords was announced, the call for submissions published. It’s exciting to see that the first talk is in already. Looking forward to yours.

Compared to last year there are two changes:

1. Submissions are no longer evaluated by Jan, Simon and myself only. Due to the large number of talks submitted last year we reached out for help to be able to split the task of reviewing talks.
2. Also the conference itself grew quite a bit in the past two years. As a result it now takes several full time positions to handle not only ticketing, hosting and software development, sponsorships, venue management, travel support, but also external communication and marketing. The team of newthinking grew quite a bit and is helping substantially with tasks that before were handled by Jan, Simon and myself exclusively to keep some of our time reserved for the fun part of schedule curation. Please make sure to include info@berlinbuzzwords.de if you have questions that need a quick answer.

We are looking forward to a successful community conference on all things scalable - be it search, NoSQL or data analytics. Don’t be afraid to submit highly technical talks - Berlin Buzzwords always has been a place for developers to discuss new technologies, algorithms and implementations.

If your community need more than just a day to meet - please do talk to us. We will be providing room for meetups on Wednesday after the conference. Those are handed out on a first come first serve basis.

If you are a local Berlin company and want to get Berlin Buzzwords into your offices, please talk to us - we are more than happy to get you in touch with one of the meetup organisers.

If you would like to co-locate trainings with Berlin Buzzwords - we are happy to co-promote you event. Talk to us to be included in our official schedule. In case you need any help organising your training, newthinking will be more than happy to provide their services for your event.

Looking forward to June: It’s amazing how large that event grew in the past two years - and almost scary to return back online after a flu and see how things unfolded magically.

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords

As a little reminder: the Call for presentations of Berlin Buzzwords will close next week on Tuesday, March 1st. Submissions on scalable search, data storage and analysis are all welcome. We are looking for presentations on the core technologies such as Apache Hadoop, CouchDB, Lucene, Redis, Voldemort but also talks on interesting use cases and system architectures.

Tickets are out for sale - don’t wait too long to get your early bird ticket.

In addition we are in the process of drafting some additional packages for those of you who would like to bring their non-tech spouse to the conference or need day care facilities for their children. If you are interested in either package please provide feedback on our blog.

Berlin Buzzwords bbuzz2011, Berlin Buzzwords

This is to announce the Berlin Buzzwords 2011. The second edition of the successful conference on scalable and open search, data processing and data storage in Germany,
taking place in Berlin.

Call for Presentations Berlin Buzzwords

http://berlinbuzzwords.de

Berlin Buzzwords 2011 - Search, Store, Scale

6/7 June 2011

The event will comprise presentations on scalable data processing. We invite you to submit talks on the topics:

• IR / Search - Lucene, Solr, katta or comparable solutions
• NoSQL - like CouchDB, MongoDB, Jackrabbit, HBase and others
• Hadoop - Hadoop itself, MapReduce, Cascading or Pig and relatives

Closely related topics not explicitly listed above are welcome. We are looking for presentations on the implementation of the systems themselves, real world applications and case studies.

Important Dates (all dates in GMT +2)

• Submission deadline: March 1st 2011, 23:59 MEZ
• Notification of accepted speakers: March 22th, 2011, MEZ.
• Publication of final schedule: April 5th, 2011.
• Conference: June 6/7. 2011

High quality, technical submissions are called for, ranging from principles to practice. We are looking for real world use cases, background on the architecture of specific projects and a deep dive into architectures built on top of e.g. Hadoop clusters.

Proposals should be submitted at http://berlinbuzzwords.de/content/cfp-0 no later than March 1st, 2011. Acceptance notifications will be sent out soon after the submission deadline. Please include your name, bio and email, the title of the talk, a brief abstract in English language. Please indicate whether you want to give a lightning (10min), short (20min) or long (40min) presentation and indicate the level of experience with the topic your audience should have (e.g. whether your talk will be suitable for newbies or is targeted for experienced users.) If you’d like to pitch your brand new product in your talk, please let us know as well - there will be extra space for presenting new ideas, awesome products and great new projects.

The presentation format is short. We will be enforcing the schedule rigorously.

If you are interested in sponsoring the event (e.g. we would be happy to provide videos after the event, free drinks for attendees as well as an after-show party), please contact us.

Follow @berlinbuzzwords on Twitter for updates. News on the conference will be published on our website at http://berlinbuzzwords.de.

Program Chairs: Isabel Drost, Jan Lehnardt, and Simon Willnauer.

Schedule and further updates on the event will be published on http://berlinbuzzwords.de Please re-distribute this CfP to people who might be interested.

Contact us at:

newthinking communications GmbH
Schönhauser Allee 6/7
10119 Berlin, Germany
Julia Gemählich
Isabel Drost
+49(0)30-9210 596

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin, Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, hbase, Lucene, Mahout