🌯 Wrapping up my visit in Armenia and the DataFest Yerevan over a very good cup

🌯 Wrapping up my visit in Armenia and the DataFest Yerevan over a very good cup of coffee.

❤️ Let’s start with the conference. A lovely crafted event, right sized so that you have a chance to interact with people and a very nice selection of speakers. Soon it felt like family.

🎸 Naturally picking out just a few talks isn’t fair to the others. I listend to many very interesting talks, though I like always indexed on getting in touch with people & exchange ideas and view - the real value of conference IMHO - and hence only participated in a very real subset of talks.

🚌 Mikhail Burtsev took us to a journey into the Promises and Failures of Large Language Models, share work on how to overcome some of the limitations but clearly highlighted many. LLMs for AGI - probably not. Loved the slightly sarcastic way of presenting ;)

📈 Augustin Žídek Zidek provided a very interesting talk on AlphaFold 3. In the second part he talked - among many other things - about leaderboard-driven development. While gamification is a known good motivator, the “teams love to optimise a single metric” triggered my thoughts. Can we transfer that to a world of estimating employees performance in corps, which is often times a many-goal driven performance estimation which is - hmm, not loved ;) .

💪 Overall I’m highly impressed about the ability to deep dive of the presenters. Always great to reconnect to research.

🙏🏻 Big Kudos to Nensi Hakobjanyan, who discovered the event, made the submission and did the majority of the work. Also she has been key for me to blend into the culture here.

🔭 I’m highly impressed by the friendly people on and off the conference. As a travel I feel very secure and able to leave the beaten tracks. I want to come back to explore more of the country to explore landscapes and wildlife. Yes, mountains are calling.

🤗 Flying back tonight and the pop up at IBC - International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam on Thursday- maybe I meet some of you there? If you around make sure to ping me here or just track me down at the AWS booth …

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