My previous post was about my poster presentation at the Madrid Machine Learning Summer School. Here, I will be writing about the social side of the experience which includes the walking tours, databeers and dinner night. I will also be sharing my observations about the city of Madrid, the people and the culture.
Walking tour to Sol (Madrid's centre)
The first social event organised for the summer school was a walking tour to the city of Madrid. We converged at Puerta de Sol where we met the Statue of the Bear and the Strawberry tree (madroño in Spanish), a symbol that is inscribed in the coat of arms of Madrid. We then proceeded to the old Royal House of the Post Office. This is where the famous clock that marks the official time of Spain hangs. There is a popular custom for the Spanish people to usher in the New Year with the eating of 12 grapes, one grape for each bell strike until it strikes Twelve. Below the clock is the Kilometer Zero spot which serves as a marker from which distances are measured. We walked to the arcade town square, Plaza Mayor, which is historically known to be a spot for great festivals and ceremonies of the State and Royals. The rooms in the flats were said to be occupied by ordinary people but also served as ceremonial rooms of the Royals who in practice only visited during official state ceremonies
Visit to Segovia
On getting to the city, the first structure we sighted at the entrance was the Aqueduct, a historical bridge which served to transport water from Rio Frio river to the city up until the 19th century. Next port of call was the Cathedral. We visited the bell tower reaching almost 90 meters which was originally constructed in the 1500s. Some parts of the tower was rebuilt in 1614 following a fire caused by a thunderstorm. We were shown where the bell ringer lived and the 9 bells which speak of the everyday life of Segovia people, of life and death, joy and pain, and their devotion. The final site for the tour was the Alcazar which initially was built as a fortress but has served as royal palace, state prison, royal artillery and military academy, and currently as a museum and military archives building. What I found fascinating was the decorations on the wall which were said to have been badly damaged by a fire that erupted in the 1800s, but whose designs were replicated from the engravings of the Spanish painter, José María Avrial. The most exciting experience was the visit to the towers – Cathedral tower and Alcazar tower.
Databeers without the beer
Databeers is a social event where people tell data stories in a relaxed atmosphere. The name literally translates to listening to data stories over a glass of beer. The rule was that the presentation shouldn’t have formula, although Arthur Gretton who happened to be one of the tutors at the summer school was excused for including one on his slide. He was the first to speak and it was about Generative Adversial Networks. BBVA Data and Analytics gave a short presentation to show the team progress. Cabify, a rival of Uber, was more technical as they shared how they designed their own Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) estimation system using Hungarian algorithm thus achieving independence from Google’s ETA. MeaningCloud’s presentation was on how to deal with the dark side of machine learning when there is insufficient training data. The last speaker’s talk was interestingly tagged everything not data science. It was about the need to looking outside the boundaries of data science when building machine learning models. For instance, you build a machine learning based dating site and match people by their interests (features) but don’t consider some facts outside the domain of data science like importance of physical attraction. As simple and casual as this talk sounded, it is really one important reason some machine learning models perform poorly in real-world applications.
Dinner night, meals, hangouts
The final social event was the dinner night held at Fábula Buey & Champagne terrace. We enjoyed welcome appetisers and drinks. Regarding dishes, the Spanish meal I enjoyed most is the Paella which is basically rice garnished with seafood and it gets it yellow color from saffron or tumeric. I also had the ham croquettes, one of the most typical tapas dishes in Spain. I found the Spanish people really helpful to tourists, at least from my own experience. Since I could not speak the language, it was difficult to communicate especially at restaurants and ticket stations when I needed to clarify my route. On several occasions the locals directed me and sometimes went the extra mile to offer help. About the city, the night life is more boisterous than I ever saw in England. I could find people gathered and having fun time at the city centre around 10pm, something I haven’t seen in England probably because of the relatively cold weather. Aha! Spanish people have dinner pretty late (9-11pm)
My final post on my Madrid summer school experience will be about the ideas and insights I gained for my research. I will be publishing it very soon so keep an eye out for it.
The widely travelled man is wiser than the aged. Keep winning Mleen