The last three days we were been at the Moore-Sloan DSE Summit (#dsesummit on Twitter). It was utterly fantastic to see all our compatriots at Berkeley and NYU, and to meet new ones. Here are a few random observations:

• The main goal of the summit was for community building. By this metric, the DSE Summit was an unqualified success. By the end of the three days I felt like I knew everyone I passed in the hall and I had experienced many substantial, half-hour-plus-long conversations with many great folks from everywhere. Kevin, Micaela, and Sarah did a great job with the planning and the gilded cage of Asilomar was a wonderful venue in which to be locked together!
• Since unconferences started creeping into workshop schedules a few years back, I have had a really mixed impression. They seem to work best with small groups where everyone is interested; bigger groups tend to devolve into presentations and advertisements by the two or three people who normally talk the most — thus two of the unconferences felt pretty useless to me. In contrast, the third unconference on the last day was great — about 10 students and data scientists debating real issues around “how to we keep a sense of community and communication going” after the summit.
• Among the scientists with data problems, the groups seemed heavily slanted towards people who are computer savvy. I heard terms like “cache line size” more often than I would have expected, and I heard terms like “data management” much less often than I would have expected. I expect this distribution to change as data-driven scientists from less computationally-savvy domains enter the field.
• UW seems to be unique among the schools in that we have a substantial and increasing number of people who are “100% DSE” (Andrew, Bill, Jake, me, plus the data scientists we are recruiting). I will be interested to see whether this difference matters in the next 5 years.
• Bill and I spent the hour introducing and taking Q&A about the UW Data Science Incubator program at the software tools working group meeting. I am excited and hopeful that versions of this program will be picked up by other schools!