Presenting at LIDSCONF 2021

Last month was the 26th LIDS Student Conference, which was held virtually. I was happy to give a talk entitled, "A New Approach to Collaborative Data Science with the Ballet Framework," which presents some of our work from our paper on Ballet. It was great to see the creativity with which the organizers approached the virtual conference format, especially since I served in the (much easier, in retrospect) role of Conference Organizer for the 2018 conference.

My presentation is now up and you can watch it here:

In memoriam

The conference was overshadowed in part by the tragic passing of my friend and classmate, Matt Brennan, who passed unexpectedly on January 26, 2021, the night before the originally scheduled conference date. He was only 26 years old.

Matt was a good friend at MIT, who I met during EECS orientation in 2016. He was always the nicest guy in the room, with a big smile, glasses, and a flushed face. Matt was a great member of the MIT community -- not only was he kind and warm to everyone he met, but he secretly (or not so secretly, depending on your research area), was a brilliant scholar with significant advances in machine learning theory. As many others have recollected, we played quite a bit of basketball, both pick up in the MIT Z-Center and also intramural basketball on the MIT EECS team. When playing pickup, he and I were often matched up as the two "bigs". He played with a lot of grit and maximum effort at all times.

May his memory be a blessing.