ML Community Summit 2022
An Inspiring Experience
Just got back from Google Developers ML Community Summit 2022. It was a great event organized by Soonson Kwon and his team Hee Jung and Nari Yoon from Google Global ML Developer Programs. I was honored to be invited to the summit among the top contributing ML GDEs and TensorFlow Group organizers.
It was a two-day event in Bangkok Thailand where I finally met the ML GDEs who I collaborated with over the years but never met in person. From the roof top dinner to the boat cruise, we had a great bonding experience with so many beautiful memories. I wrote this post to share my stories.
Day 0
In the afternoon, I got to hang out with ML GDE Sayak Paul from India. This is the very first time we met in person after collaborating on multiple projects over the years. We went to Mango Tango and had the best mango sticky rice with ice cream, a popular Thai dessert.
Some of us who arrived early attended the pre-summit dinner in the evening.
After dinner we took a group photo together, which was the first of many group photos from the summit.
Day 1
At breakfast, I met ML GDE Merve Noyan from Hugging Face.
At summit registration, ML GDE George Soloupis gave me a lovely surprise gift by his 10-year old daughter Christina. She heard about the summit and made a portrait of me for her dad to bring it. I felt so special to receive a gift all the way from Greece!
Sayak, George and I took photos together. In 2020, we collaborated on a project that won a #TFCommunitySpotlight award and now we finally met in person.
The conference started. Soonson gave us a program update when he shared the impressive stats of the ML community. He also shared with us the history of how ML GDEs got started, growing to be the largest GDE community today!
We each got a copy of the MapReduce paper signed by Jeff Dean as a souvenir!
After project updates on Cloud, JAX and TPU, each attendee (ML GDEs and TF user group organizers) gave a 5-minute brief. It was really great to hear everyone sharing their open-source project accomplishments and upcoming ideas.
After the project briefs, we divided into groups to brainstorm on the various ML products.
After I gave my intro, Hee told me that she graduated from Parsons School of Design where I’m currently studying 3D Virtual Fashion Design.
In the evening we rode a bus together to dinner. While on the bus I enjoyed chatting with Sam Witteveen from Singapore and Victor Dibia from the Bay Area. We chatted about gadgets, cameras, video recording, 3D modeling and JavaScript. Sam showed me his digital human product, very fascinating. Victor and I have met before and we got a chance to get to know each other better during this summit.
We had a roof-top dinner with the river view of Bangkok. The temples lit up in the beautiful orange colors along the river.
Day 2
Me, Sayak and Merve hanging out in the temple.
While on the tour bus I chatted with ML GDE Jerry Wu from Taiwan. This is his first time attending a community conference with attendees from around the world. So this is all new to him.
I love the boat cruise where I rode with Jerry, Merve, Martin, Sayak, Sam and Victor. Very peaceful as we cruised through the Thai houses by the river, with locals and little kids waving to us ‘hello’.
At dinner I got to connect with Chansung Park, ML GDE from Korea. We chatted about a lot of things: from how to successfully run GDG events to future ML project collaboration ideas. I was very touched when he showed me his facebook profile background with the sketchnotes I made for the TensorFlow Contributor Award last year.
In the evening, Usha Rengaraju returned to me my mis-placed power bank and we finally got a chance to connect one on one. She is very passionate about using ML to help people with autism and we chatted about being part of the ML community.
Thank you Soonson, Hee and Nari for organizing such a great community event. I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with the ML GDEs and TensorFlow User Group organizers. What an inspiring bonding experience!
