It’s been a whirlwind of a fall for Sift Science. Twelve-plus events in 3 months — including incredible tech talk opportunities, university visits, and interesting conferences — helped us to close out our 2014 push. What are your favorite events to attend? What tech talk should Sift host next?
Join us on this recap of our fall, where we fell in love…. With great new friends, places, potential Sifties, and Sifterns!
Greylock Tech Fair
July 31, 2014
Held in our own backyard at the San Francisco Ferry Building, the Greylock tech fair was a fun event! Sift joined 49 other startups to meet hundreds of CS local students.
HBase Meetup
August 28, 2014
Sift hosted the SF HBase Meetup, welcoming 52 guests and 3 incredible speakers, including Michael Stack of Cloudera and our own Tech Lead for ML Infrastructure, Andrey Gusev! This event was an opportunity to showcase our amazing new office and gather some like-minded individuals, excited about scaling and data management.
PennApps Hackathon
September 12-14, 2014
In our first trip to UPenn’s Fall Hackathon, we encountered some incredible projects and awesome teams. Sift sponsored 2 prizes, one for Best Data Viz and another for Best Use of ML, and the hacks really blew us away.
Doug at Airbnb Nerds
October 1, 2014
Sift’s first engineer, Doug Beeferman, spoke at Airbnb Engineering’s regularly scheduled tech talk night in early October. Feature engineering proved a fascinating topic for his audience, as Doug demonstrated how Sift takes machine learning out of academia and into real-world, real-time fraud detection.
Micah for APICraftSF
Oct 2, 2014
The very next day, Sift engineer Micah Wylde impressed the API Craft SF crowd with an overview of the evolution our API. His talk provided great insight into the time and effort that Sift dedicated to making its console as user-friendly as possible.
Sift Engineer @mwylde talking about our API design at the SF #APICraft meetup hosted @splunk pic.twitter.com/l72ctzfGZB
— Sift Science (@siftscience) October 3, 2014
Reflections | Projections
October 2, 2014
For R|P, Sift sent two Illinois alumni to connect with the students and share their sifty knowledge. In addition to setting up a table at the career fair, Andrey and Alex shared their insights with the Illinois SIGMIS group on machine learning in the real world and working at a startup.
Tech Talk, MIT
October 6, 2014
With the help of our summer Siftern Keren, Doug took his tech talk on the road. Four pizzas and 40 cannoli later, we connected with a host of ML-focused students on their home turf.
TODAY @dougb on Feature Engineering with Machine Learning for Real-Time Fraud Detection, 6:30 pm #MIT 5-234 @MITEECS pic.twitter.com/Pb3UMZxVLX
— Sift Science (@siftscience) October 6, 2014
Grace Hopper Celebration
October 8-11, 2014
Sift’s first official visit to the Grace Hopper Conference was totally awesome. Not only did we meet hundreds of smart, ambitious, and inspired women, but we also spread the word about Sift Science! Our Lead Solutions Engineer, Katherine, presented on “Fraud Detection with Machine Learning: A Case Study from Sift Science”, and drew quite the crowd. We can’t wait for GHC15!
Code@Night, Princeton
October 10, 2014
The next stop on Doug’s East Coast tour en route to Start@A Startup was at Princeton’s Code@Night. Very sifty Siftern-emeritus David hosted the event and rounded up fifty Tigers for the event.
Start @ A Startup
October 11-12, 2014
Sift CEO Jason and Doug took NYC by storm with Start@, hosting a few panels and offering key learnings for the cream-of-the-crop student attendees. With another talk in the bag and countless engaging conversations, our second year at Start@ was a great success.
Listening to a panel with speakers from @siftscience,@getClever,@HearsaySocial, @asana,@Qualtrics! #startat14 pic.twitter.com/YzzZiXNW7c
— Jay Bensal (@jbensal) October 11, 2014
UW Startup Career Fair
October 21, 2014
Ahh, UW. As Jason’s alma mater and the old stomping grounds of many a Siftern, UW holds a very special place in Sift’s heart. We had a table set up at the career fair, and a special talk during the post-event reception. Did you see our twinkling Sift booth?
UC Berkeley Startup Fair
October 22, 2014
Sift Science employs several proud Golden Bears, and with Cal right across the Bay, we couldn’t help but join in on the UCB Startup Fair. As expected, we met so many amazing students of all years and emphases.
The @ucbstartupfair is on — come say hello to our team. We have Nerds (the candy) and nerds (the awesome people)! pic.twitter.com/QnWrQsfrTS
— Sift Science (@siftscience) October 22, 2014
SF Bay Area Machine Learning Meetup at Sift
December 3, 2014
Our final external event of the year takes place tonight! Will you be there?
What are some of the events that you attend or host every year? Which are on your not-to-be-missed list?
