Gallery of the Uncommon

ECMLPKDD2015

By mid-September, there were reports of strong winds accompanied by heavy rain which put the north of Portugal on red alert. Combined with the storm, the City of Porto was also affected by a tempest of engineers, from several areas of the globe, who were seen walking around the old part of town. If the rain and wind were caused by the Azores High (which is always to blame in these situations), the torrent of  computer scientists  was caused by the Machine Learning conference organised by INESC TEC.

BIP has found that the population welcomed the 600 conference participants warmly and, by the end of the event, residents were already familiarised with the concepts of machine learning and data mining. However, the major source of contention was the name of the conference: ECMLPKDD2015. According to Miss Alzira, who lives downtown, the name is not original. In fact, she guaranteed that her kitty, Whiskers, had typed “ECMLPKDD2015” simply by sitting on her laptop. On the other hand, Mr. Inácio, who owns a butcher shop in Miragaia, claimed that he had seen the name of the conference before. “I can tell you that ‘ECMLPKDD2015’ was the password I received to access the tax office website”, he stated with outrage.

In fact, the initialism ECMLPKDD2015 is, in itself, a big data problem. For that reason, the organising committee chose it instead of a more pompous name. However, other conferences preferred to invest in the marketing component when it came to choosing the name. For example, Darpa Active Networks Conference and Exposition (DANCE) or Cross-Layer Optimized Wireless Networks Symposium (CLOWNS) are easily understandable acronyms.