data science conference

If you’ve ever been to a conference, you know how much there is to learn. Which data science conferences will you attend? 

2019’s coming to an end. Check out my list of 8 Data Science Conferences To Attend In 2020.

Data Science Dojo’s sponsoring Kaggle Days Tokyo! Kagglers of all levels are welcome to join Grandmasters, Masters, and other data science experts to grow their skills at the first global series of offline events for Kagglers.

Have you missed these fun data science conferences?

Most, if not all, industries will have major conferences for members to attend. They consist of educational workshops, networking opportunities, and industry leader keynotes for attendees to absorb.  Did I mention conferences are fun? For those of you who have attended a conference in the past, you know meeting new people and learning in a new environment is often invigorating.

Especially for a data enthusiast.

Data science may be a relatively new industry, but conferences have still managed to bring together industry leaders around the world. from North America to Asia, you can find a data science conference at almost any time of the year. Like a data science BootCamp, the hardest part is narrowing down which one(s) to attend.

Strata data science conference

If you’re looking for a conference where “cutting-edge science and new business fundamentals intersect – and merge” look no further than the Strata Data Conference. A collaboration between O’Reilly and Cloudera, Strata offers an insider experience to develop new skills as well as learn about the future of data science. Strata has three locations set for 2019.

Dates: March 25 – 28, 2019

Location: San Francisco, CA

Venue: Moscone Center

Dates: April 29 – May 2, 2019

Location: London, UK

Venue: ExCel London

Dates: September 23 – 26, 2019

Location: New York, NY

Venue: Javits Center

Predictive analytics innovation summit

The Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit combines keynote presentations with interactive breakout sessions and open discussion to create an interactive experience. With confirmed speakers from Facebook, eBay, and Uber, you will be learning and networking with the best the industry has to offer.

Dates: April 29 – 30, 2019

Location: San Diego, CA

Venue: Marriott Marquis and Marina

Enterprise data world

Enterprise Data World’s (EWS) 23rd annual conference speaks for itself. 6 total days, three of which are dedicated to tutorials and workshops, are packed with data professionals to educate the world on data management.

Dates: March 17 – 22, 2019

Location: Boston, MA

Venue: Sheraton Boston Hotel

Artificial intelligence conference

Presented by O’Reilly and Intel AI, the AI conference is an event you won’t want to miss out on. Featured speakers from Twitter, Princeton University, and Columbia University are sure to pique your curiosity and the New York location.  Speakers at the other locations have yet to be announced.

Dates: April 15 – 18, 2019

Location: New York, NY

Venue: Hilton Midtown

Dates: June 18 – 21, 2019

Location: Beijing, China

Venue: Beijing International Hotel Conference Center

Dates: September 9 – 12, 2019

Location: San Jose, CA

Venue: San Jose McEnery Convention Center

Dates: October 14 – 17, 2019

Location: London, UK

Venue: Hilton London Metropole

DataFest

In its third year, “DataFest will showcase Scotland’s leading role in data science and artificial intelligence on the international stage,” creating a networking platform for local and international talent to interact with each other. A two-week data festival focusing on making data a community effort, DataFest asks you use #datatogether in all your social posts to emphasize that fact. DataFest consists of six events across Scotland:

Event: Data Summit

Dates: March 21 – 22, 2019

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Venue: The Assembly Rooms

Event: Data Talent

Dates: March 19, 2019

Location: Glasgow, UK

Venue: Hilton Hotel

Event: Fringe Events

Dates: March 11 – 22, 2019

Location: Across Scotland

Venue: Varies

Event: Data Tech

Dates: March 14, 2019

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Venue: TBD

Event: Women in Data Science

Dates: March 11, 2019

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Venue: National Museum of Scotland

Event: Executive Dinner

Dates: N/A

Location: N/A

Venue: N/A

Open data science conference

As one of the largest gatherings of professional data scientists, the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) hosted 12,000 attendees across 3 conferences in 2017. ODSC’s goal is to bring together the people who “are working on shaping the present and future of AI and data science”.  This year, ODSC will be hosting four major conferences across Asia, North America, and Europe.

Dates: April 30 – May 3, 2019

Location: Boston, MA

Venue: Hynes Convention Center

Dates: August 7 – 10, 2019

Location: Bengaluru, India

Venue: Sheraton Grand Bangalore Hotel

Dates: November 19 – 22, 2019

Location: London, UK

Venue: Hotel Novotel London West

Dates: October 29 – November 1st, 2019

Location: San Francisco, CA

Venue: Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport

Predictive analytics world

2019 is already looking very different for Predictive Analytics World (PAW). Being called Mega-PAW, there will only be one mega-conference made up of 5 industry-specific events (called conferences). Throughout 5-days, 5 conferences on Business, Finance, Deep Learning, Healthcare, and Industry 4.0 will take place with 160 speakers and more than 150 sessions.

Dates: June 16 – 20, 2019

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Venue: Caesars Palace

Other conferences to consider

• Open edX 2019
• Deep Learning Summit Boston
• Data Science Salon | October 17, 2019, | Seattle
• The 2019 Oil and Gas Machine Learning Symposium | Oct. 30, 2019, | Houston
• Big Data LDN 2019 | Nov. 13 – 14, 2019 | London
• Business Analytics Intelligence Conference | Dec. 5 – 7, 2019 | Bangalore
• Kaggle Days Tokyo | Dec. 11 – 12, 2019 | Tokyo

In 2019, Data Science Dojo sponsored Kaggle Days taking place from December 11 to 12.

Kaggle Days will give Data Science Dojo a platform to continue giving back to the data science community.

Kaggle Days is a conference created by Kaggle and LogicAI for Kagglers to meet offline. It’s the “first global series of offline events for seasoned data scientists and Kagglers” as written on the Kaggle Days website.

These days take place all over the world, including current and past events in China, Dubai, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, and Warsaw. Attendees meet Grandmasters, win prizes, and compete in offline events.

They also have the opportunity to learn from seasoned professionals who are there to help grow the community.

Raja Iqbal, Chief Data Scientist and CEO at Data Science Dojo, is one of the seasoned professionals looking to help the community grow.

“We have 10 Meetup groups spread across the globe, but we’ve never been as far east as Tokyo. The closest we get is Singapore.” Raja said while counting on his fingers. “I just can’t wait to meet more people from a different part of the world who are excited to learn data science.”

What to expect at Kaggle days Tokyo

In Tokyo, attendees can expect to network, learn, compete, and earn prizes, like in many of the conferences. Kaggle Grandmasters, Masters, and data science experts will be in attendance to give presentations, talk shop, and network with everyone in attendance.

Data Science Dojo will be there to give a 90-minute workshop as well as network, hire, and learn from top Kagglers. The topic of DSD’s workshop has been narrowed down to two possibilities:

• The Art of Building Machine Learning Models for Large Scale Machine Learning
• Feature Engineering for Real-World Machine Learning Problems

Kaggle CTO, Ben Hamner, is the Keynote Speaker giving a talk titled Leveling-up Kaggle Competitions. Other talks from presenters include:

• Computer Vision with Keras – Dimitris Katsios, ML Engineer at LPIXEL
• Joining NN Competitions (for beginners) – Tomohiro Takesako, Competitions Master
• My Journey to Grandmaster – Jin Zhan,  Competitions Grandmaster
• Intro to BigQuery ML for Kagglers – Polong Lin, Developer Advocate at Google

Two Kaggle Competitions team members will also be giving talks. Julia Elliott (Competitions Team Lead) and Walter Reade (Data Scientist).

Presentations are tentative and subject to change. This will be updated when the full agenda has been announced.

About Data Science Dojo

Data Science Dojo offers a 5 day, in-person, and top-rated Data Science Bootcamp around the world. During the course, students learn everything from predictive analytics and ensemble methods to recommender systems and the fundamentals of big data engineering.

Raja and his team of instructors have trained more than 4,000 individuals from nearly 1,000 different companies. Attendees come from diverse backgrounds, including software development, management consulting, medicine, education, project management, target=”_blank” public service, finance, not-for-profit, mining, oil and gas, and more.

Helpful links

• Kaggle Days Tokyo – Home
• Data Science Dojo – Home
• Kaggle Days – Facebook Page

Data Science Dojo meetup groups

• Seattle
• Austin
• Silicone Valley
• New York
• Phoenix
• Washington DC
• Chicago
• Toronto
• Singapore
• Karachi

Data Science Dojo sponsored Kaggle Days Tokyo. Here’s an overview of what Kaggle Days are and what to expect.

Overview

Kaggle is an online learning platform for data science and machine learning. The educator uses competitions to help its users (called Kaggelers) practice and grow their data science skillset with publicly available datasets.

Kaggle Days are events that take place around the world. They started as a partnership between LogicAI and Kaggle as a way to bring Kaggelers together for an offline event. Competitions, seminars, workshops, and networking opportunities are available for Kaggelers to participate in. These events take place as one-off local events (Meetups) as well as multiday global events (conferences).

Kaggle days Tokyo – Agenda

The global event in Tokyo is taking place this December 11-12. Registration closed within a matter of days of opening, which shows the amount of popularity these events have among their participants. The agenda is jam-packed with exciting talks and tutorials from Kaggle Grandmasters and data science professionals, and I’d like to highlight a few.

Raja Iqbal – Tutorial on model validation and parameter tuning

Raja Iqbal is the CEO, Chief Data Scientist, and Lead Instructor at Data Science Dojo. He has an MS from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Tulane University. He spent more than 6 years at Microsoft Bing and Bing Ads working on various data science and machine learning research projects. Below is a description, given by Raja, of his workshop:

“Cross-validation is a popular technique for model validation and parameter tuning. In this tutorial, we will discuss other model validation and parameter techniques in scenarios where k-fold cross-validation may not be the best choice. We will also discuss some parametric and non-parametric statistical tests for comparing models.”

Why should you attend? 

Modern machine learning is about gathering the right data, feature engineering, validation, and parameter tuning. Not understanding the concepts or using the techniques correctly renders machine learning useless.

Date: 12/11/19

Time: 10:15 am – 11:45 am

Location: 27F Hanabi Room

Jin Zhan – My journey to grandmaster: Success and failure

Becoming a Kaggle Grandmaster (GM) is no small accomplishment. It takes years of practice to obtain this impressive title. Jin Zhan has multiple years of experience in data science and machine learning, as well as Hadoop. Currently, Zhan is a Data Scientist at Fast Retailing, where he focuses on demand forecasting, recommender systems, and customer comment analysis.

Why should you attend?

The original reason I chose this out of the bunch was that Jin is going to talk about his failures before becoming a grandmaster. Talking about our failures is often difficult, but we can learn more from them than our successes.

After (admittedly) combing through his LinkedIn profile, I found Zhan to be the perfect picture of success on Kaggle. His experience doesn’t come from one place and his education comes from multiple sources. Besides, Zhan’s a Grandmaster. What other reason to attend do you need?

Date: 12/11/19

Time: 4:35 pm – 4:45 pm

Location: 27F Matsuri Room

Kaggle competition

During a Kaggle competition, typically the only help or mentoring you receive is from your teammates or through Kaggle Kernels. At the competition in Tokyo (as well as the other global events) mentors will be available to help you along the way.

The mentors for the competition in Tokyo include:

• Ryuji Sakata – Kaggle Grandmaster and Data Scientist/Researcher at Panasonic Corporation
• Walter Reade – Data Scientist on Kaggle Competitions Team
• Dimitry Gordeev – Kaggle Grandmaster and Data Scientist at UNIQA
• Pawel Jankiewicz – Kaggle Grandmaster and Owner/Founder at LogicAI
• Jin Zhan – Kaggle Grandmaster and Data Scientist at Fast Retailing

You should feel compelled to pick their brains as much as you can. All of these people are successful and established data scientists with extensive knowledge of Kaggle competitions. Get as much out of them as you can.

Date: 12/12/19

Time: 10:30 am – 6:30 pm

If you’re a Kaggeler who missed out on joining a global Kaggle Days event, keep an eye on their schedule. You can also join a local event and get to know your local Kaggelers!

Data science seminars are continuing to grow in popularity around the world. Here is a list of 4 conferences to attend in Asia.

Data science seminars in Asia

Previously, I’ve written posts about 2019 and 2020 data science conferences to attend. Researching for both of those posts has given me a fair amount of knowledge about conferences happening in different regions around the world. In this article, I’m going to cover 4 data science seminars in Asia that you should consider attending in 2020.

1. Open Data Science Conferences (ODSC), India

ODSC doesn’t need an introduction. It’s one of the biggest and most well-known conferences out there. With four days of action, two of which are dedicated solely to training, this is a conference you don’t want to miss. ODSC specializes in the latest tool, techniques, and practices. This conference might be a little overwhelming due to the sheer volume of events for a beginner, but if you feel comfortable with the basics and want to continue learning, you should check it out.

Dates: September 9-12, 2020

Location: Bengaluru, India

Venue: Sheraton Grand Bangalore Hotel

2. Big Data World, Singapore

Many times, the first thing you should look at to see how big or popular a conference is is the companies sponsoring the event. When you look at Big Data World Singapore’s sponsors, you see companies like Oracle, Huawei, TIBCO, and SAP. With those sponsors and many others, do you need to see anything else? The answer’s yes, by the way.

This data conference doesn’t just have great sponsors, but also amazing speakers. In 2019, the speakers had job titles like:

• Senior Data & Applied Scientist
• Head of Business Intelligence
• Senor Solutions Consultant
• VP of Enterprise AI
• Head of Digitalization

And the list keeps going.

If you’re going to pass up on ODSC, your next stop should be in Singapore to attend this conference.

Dates: October 14-15, 2020

Location: Singapore, Singapore

Venue: Sands Expo and Convention Center

If you’re looking for a strict, face-to-face learning experience, you might consider Data Science Dojo’s data science boot camp.

3. Machine Learning Developers Summit 2020 (MLDS20)

MLDS 2020 will feature some of the foremost individuals in machine learning. Put on my Analytics India Magazine, MLDS promises to be packed with learning and networking sessions to allow you to build relationships with prominent professionals and apply what you’ve learned as soon as you get home. There are two different locations where you can attend, so choose the one that’s right for you!

Dates: January 22-23, 2020

Location: Bangalore, India

Venue: Nimhans Convention Center

Dates: January 30-31, 2020

Location: Hyderabad, India

Venue: Khemka Auditorium, Indian School of Business

4. MarTech Summit

The MarTech Summit claims to be “the only marketing technology summit in Asia”. MarTech’s goal is to help you learn and tackle the skills required for digital transformation. At this conference, you will meet some of the leading experts in marketing technology from leading brands. For example, the conference held in Singapore has speakers from Coca-Cola, HP, and Kellogg’s. As a marketing manager, I wish they held a session in the United States.

Dates: February 20-21, 2020

Location: Singapore

Venue: Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre

Dates: April 22-23, 2020

Location: Hong Kong

Venue: TBA

Dates: May 27-28, 2020

Location: Bankok, Thailand

Venue: TBA

Dates: September 16-17, 2020

Location: Jakarta, Indonesia

Venue: TBA

North America (the USA and Canada) has a crazy amount of data science conferences to choose from. Here are 6 conferences you should consider attending.

There is an abundance of events to attend so make sure to do your homework. I’ve also included resources at the end of the article if you’d like to look at other options.

Maybe North America isn’t the region you’re interested in? Don’t worry, I’ve also written about conferences to attend in other regions of the world:

• Asia
• Europe (in progress)
• Latin and South America (in progress)
• The Middle East and Africa (in progress)

1.  Women in analytics

This conference was also featured in my list for 2020, so it’s no surprise that I also included it here.

Women in Analytics (WIA) is all about providing “visibility to the women making an impact in the analytics space and provide a platform for them to lead the conversations around the advancements of analytical research, development, and application,”. The conference has grown every year since its founding in 2016, now taking 3 days to accommodate all the speakers. People of all genders are welcome to join.

Date: June 3-5, 2020

Location: Columbus, OH, USA

Venue: Greater Columbus Convention Center

2. The data science conference

Reverberating from my blog post on data science conferences to attend in 2020, I would highly suggest attending The Data Science Conference.

Vendor-free, sponsor-free, and recruiter-free, this conference isn’t trying to sell you anything. Organizers are just trying to bring together the best data science minds to help attendees learn and grow the field. Obviously, if you’re attending a conference to simply network you should pass on this event, but if you want to learn in a distraction-free environment you should highly consider attending.

Date: May 14-15, 2020

Location: Chicago

Venue: Gleacher Center

3. TDWI Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…Okay, that’s completely untrue because you’re going to take away a lot from Transforming Data With Intelligence (TDWI) in Las Vegas.

TDWI is one of the leading data science conferences in North America. Even if you have to travel, you should consider attending. TDWI prides itself in offering full and half-day courses, rather than the traditional 45 to 60-minute sessions, and that’s what really sets this conference apart for me.

You actually get time to pick the brain of the instructor rather than running through a session and quickly forgetting what it was about because the next one has already started. TDWI also has a Sell Your Boss template to help you get those work days off for professional development.

Date: February 9-14, 2020

Location: Las Vegas

Venue: Caesars Palace

4. Predictive Analytics World (PAW) Las Vegas

PAW typically comes to Las Vegas every year and doesn’t really need much explaining. The conference is one of the leaders in data science, machine learning, and AI coverage and is also one of the most widely attended. Formerly known as Mega-Paw and being rebranded as Machine Learning Week, you can expect the same great conference.

Machine Learning Week is technically 5 conferences and 10 workshops with 160 speakers and 150+ sessions packed into 1 week. They sell passes for all 5 days or as little as 2. It depends on what you want to get out of the week. Business, Healthcare, Finance, Industry 4.0 (IoT), and Deep Learning are the five conferences taking place during the week.

Keynotes from GM, Lyft, Google, Kennesaw State University, Manulife, and Fidelity Investments highlight the list of speakers at ML Week. If you can’t attend all 5 days, make sure to find the conference that most applies to your industry (or future industry) to get the most out of it.

Date: May 31 – June 4, 2020

Location: Las Vegas

Venue: Caesars Palace

5. ODSC East 2020

The Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) is one of the best in the world. It’s 5 days of learning, networking, developing, and building that leave you exhausted at the end of each day. It includes 8 focus areas spread across 5 days, with 3 of those days strictly for training.

The best conferences don’t earn their title without incredible content. Some of the speakers at ODSC East are from some of the most renowned universities and organizations. Google, Harvard Medical School, Bloomberg, and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab all have representatives speaking/instructing during the conference.

The most difficult part of attending will be choosing who’s talk you should attend. That would require a whole different blog post, so I won’t get into it.

Date: April 13-17, 2020

Location: Boston, MA, USA

Venue: Boston Hynes Convention Center

6. Big data and analytics Summit Canada

What I love about the Big Data and Analytics Summit is that it’s not as big as some of the conferences previously mentioned. It won’t be as chaotic, you won’t feel overwhelmed, and you’ll get more networking time with speakers and peers.

The other great thing is the list of speakers still comes from reputable companies in the field. Representatives from McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, UPS, and Sephora will all be in attendance at the 2020 event. One speaker that I would actually like to see is  Sunanda Parthasarthy, Associate Director of  Data Science & Algorithms at Wayfair.

Sunanda is joined by Eugene Wen and Niraj Krishna for a panel titled Secure Buy-in for your Big Data Initiatives in a Data-Driven Culture. They’ll be giving tips on visualizations, value propositions, and talking about their experience. This conference looks to give you a real-world outlook on big data and data-driven cultures.

Date: February 12-13, 2020

Location: Toronto, ON

Venue: Hyatt Regency Toronto Hotel

Resource of other conferences

• KDnuggets
• Data Pipeline
• Kolabtree
• A Data Science Blog

Also, If you want to learn data science for professional development without all the distractions from a conference, consider attending a data science Bootcamp taught by Data Science Dojo.

Data Science Dojo is partnered with ODSC West 2020. Here are some of the key things to note.

Whether it’s data science bootcamps, conferences, sporting events, birthday parties, etc… in-person events around the world have had to adjust to COVID-19. Open Data Science Conference and Expo (ODSC) are no different. So how has one of the largest data science conferences adjusted to the current climate and who should we be excited to see speak?

About ODSC West

This year, ODSC is taking a hybrid approach to delivering the conference. Taking place October 27th – 30th, the conference will be held both virtually and in person. It will involve 40 training sessions, forty workshops, two hundred speakers, and three hundred hours of content. If you’re looking for a networking opportunity, they are also expecting 7500 attendees. I don’t think I need to dive deeper to say there’s going to be plenty to do at ODSC West, but what should you prioritize? There are 4 presenters that jump out to me right away:

• Lisa Amini, Ph.D.: Director, IBM Research – Cambridge at IBM Research AI
• Yashesh A. Shroff, Ph.D.: AI/ML Partner Ecosystem Manager and Strategic Planner at Intel
• Suchi Saria, Ph.D.: Director, Machine Learning & Healthcare Lab at Johns Hopkins University
• Reza Shiftehfar, Ph.D.: Engineering Management & Leadership at Uber

We don’t know what they will be presenting quite yet but based on their experience I’m pretty excited to find out.

Conference focus areas

ODSC West has 8 focus areas:

• Machine Learning and Deep Learning
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Research Frontiers
• Data Science Kick-start
• Machine Learning for Programmers
• Data Visualization
• MLOps & Data Engineering
• Mini-Bootcamp

I won’t go through all these sessions, but as someone who works in marketing, I’m most excited for the NLP track.  To make a long story short, NLP is used as a method for computers to analyze natural language. It has made huge strides in the last couple of years and has seemed to explode in popularity throughout data science as an industry. I see NLP being a necessary technique for the future of marketing, if it isn’t already, which is why I’m personally excited for this track. Watch the video below if you want a short introduction to NLP.

ODSC west

If you’re interested in attending ODSC West, you can use Data Science Dojo’s community discount code (ODSC_VC_DataScienceDojo) to get up to 65% off passes.

• Link for General Passes
• Link for bootcamp passes