Hello, I'm @lunardog. I work in Cookpad's Research and Development team as a machine learning researcher. I also host Tokyo Machine Learning Kitchen events. If you'd like to attend, you can sign up using meetup.com or connpass.
I first heard about Cookpad back in 2012 when I joined Tokyo Rails Meetup. At the time, Rails was immensely popular in the developer community and many coders, if not working with Rails in their day jobs, would learn Rails and build hobby projects in Rails after hours. I remember being quite impressed by the talks, especially the ones by Cookpad employees. I was amazed by Cookpad's hospitality and willingness to share the event space, the expertise of the staff and even contribute to open source projects. Cookpad was truly the cornerstone of the Rails community for Tokyo.
(A talk at the Tokyo ML event)
Fast forward to now. Machine Learning in general and Deep Learning in particular is the hot topic. I joined Cookpad's newly created Research and Development department as a Machine Learning researcher. Cookpad is, as it was those years ago, a dynamic, fast-paced company with a positive attitude to open source and sharing knowledge, be it recipes, open-source code or datasets for machine learning researchers. I have decided to make it my mission to contribute to the community of Deep Learning researchers in Tokyo by organizing Tokyo Machine Learning Kitchen events. Much like Tokyo Rails, the ML Kitchen events are a place where professionals and hobbyists can get together to share their interests, network and enjoy a good meal.
The focus of ML Kitchen events is networking between practitioners of Machine Learning. You can expect presentations on:
- professional or personal ML-related projects
- machine learning, deep learning, data science walkthroughs
- paper reviews: own or found somewhere
- reviews of machine learning frameworks and libraries
- really interesting talks about math and statistics
To further facilitate networking, Cookpad provides snacks prepared in the kitchen where the event takes place. This is why it's called "ML Kitchen", by the way. It takes place in a kitchen.
Talks are in English, but it's not a problem to do a talk in Japanese, if the slideshow is in English. We usually have a keynote talk, followed by a snack break and a series of lightning talks. We end the evening with more networking, exchanging of business cards, eating and drinking.
If you'd like to share something with the Machine Learning community in Tokyo, contact me through our group page or meetup or raise an issue in our github repository.
Hope to see you soon!
