Simon built his first computer out of Lego bricks and learned to program soon after. Emergence, networks, modes of thought, limits of language and expression are what makes him smile (and stay up at night). The combination of lisp and machine learning put him on the path of always striving to make himself redundant if not outright obsolete.
Currently, Simon is working hard to become obsolete at Metabase where he is trying to build an artificial data scientist and imbue visualisations with understanding and context.
Simon tweets at @sbelak.
Talks I've Given
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The Subtle Art of Recommendation (Algorithms)
Featuring Simon Belak
Recommendation algorithms and their variations such as ranking are the most common way for machine learning to find its way into a product where it is not the main focus.
data ranking ux algorithms recommendation -
Sketch algorithms
Featuring Simon Belak
In this talk we will look at how to efficiently (in both space and time) summarize large, potentially unbounded, streams of data by approximating the underlying distribution using so-called sketch algorithms. The main approach we are going to be looking at is summarization via histograms....
ai-&-ml -
Sketch Algorithms
Featuring Simon Belak
In this talk, you will look at how to efficiently (in both space and time) summarize large, potentially unbounded, streams of data by approximating the underlying distribution using so-called sketch algorithms. The main approach you are going to be looking at is summarization via histograms....
analytics distributed-computing sketch-algorithms stream-processing statistics -
Transducing for fun and profit
Featuring Simon Belak
Transducers -- composable algorithmic transformation decoupled from input or output sources -- are Clojure’s take on data transformation. In this talk we will look at what makes a transducer; push their composability to the limit chasing the panacea of building complex single-pass...
concept -
A data layer in Clojure - Intermediate
Featuring Simon Belak
Clojure has always been good at manipulating data. With the release of spec and Onyx (“a masterless, cloud scale, fault tolerant, high performance distributed computation system”) good became best. In this talk Simon will walk you through a streaming data layer architecture build around Kafka and...
infiniteconf stream-processing data-engineering introspection bigdata -
Living with spec
Featuring Simon Belak
In this talk, you will discover how the 15k LOC codebase was implemented with spec so you don't have to (but probably should). Validation; testing; destructuring; composable “data macros” via conformers; we’ve tried spec in all its multifaceted glory. You will discover a distillation of...
clojure clojurex speaker bigdata testing test macros