Machine learning is moving incredibly quickly. To keep up, many practitioners spend several weeks a year at conferences. However, conference presentations are all on work submitted months prior, meaning that people are already intimately familiar with the content (and it’s often already been surpassed).

We’d like to try instead hosting an event focused on the most valuable part of any conference: the people. Please join us for our first Machine Learning Unconference, an experimental gathering driven by its participants rather than an organizing committee.

The unconference⁠(opens in a new window) will be a free event at the OpenAI office in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday, October 7-8, 2016. We welcome participants from around the globe. As of August 22, we have finished accepting applications for the unconference.

Conferences play two main roles: social gathering and publication. We feel that these two roles are somewhat orthogonal and can be better served separately.