Episode 11 - Max Speaks @ The Yale Computer Society

Last week, I spoke at the Yale computer society. Here’s the recording and a description of my talk.

Engineer and Podcaster Max Sklar shares his story about building software from his time at Yale to the Foursquare Innovation Lab. He’ll cover:
- What he has learned about working on vast location databases, building large-scale machine learning algorithms, and designing chatbots and apps that people actually want to use.
- Different ways to approach career and on working in teams
- Where the tech/software industry is going in the next decade and encourage Yalies to follow up on their ideas.

I talked about my original Stickymap project.
The Marsbot project.
Foursquare Jobs.
Yale’s new residential colleges.
My paper on the Dirichlet Distribution and my presentation at the Machine Learning Meetup hosted through hakka labs.

People who I referenced:
Dana Angluin, my advisor and professor at Yale. She made the introductions to set up this talk.
Yann Lecun (twitter) - my machine learning professor at NYU and current Director of AI research at Facebook known for many AI advances, and particularly his work on Convolutional Neural Nets. Convolutional Neural Nets are how we get image recognition to work.
My colleague at Foursquare Zen Fan.

I referenced many previous episodes:
Episode 7 with Dennis Crowley on trying out your ideas
Episode 3 on building Foursquare’s Rating System with Stephanie
Episode 5 on Bitcoin and Ethereum
Episode 9 on the fixing online communication with Facebook