For ODSC East 2020, our preliminary schedule is a unique collection of the leading experts and rising stars of data science. We’ve expanded both the depth and breadth of our event to encompass everything from a junior kickstart track to our advanced data science research frontiers, and everything in between. Be sure to register soon, as our 50% discount ends this Friday, Jan 31!

Even if you can’t attend ODSC East this April in Boston (free live stream anyone?) check out our latest top 5 sessions in 5 focus areas to see what’s currently popular in data science and AI and who you should be paying attention to in the field.

NLP Tracks

  1. Thomas Wolf, the academic and creator behind the popular Hugging Face Transformers, will be presenting on how his API framework has made libraries like BERT, ERNIE, and others, more accessible. 
  2. NLP researcher Jacob Andreas from MIT CSAIL will be leading a session on building intelligent agents, which will make Chatbots and other agents much more intelligent, with the goal of engaging in proper communication with humans and not just functional in a question-answer scenario.
  3. David Talby, PhD, at Pacific AI, will discuss the state of NLP at scale, specifically the use of Spark for NLP, including use cases and practical Spark implementation tips. Additionally, along with Guneet Walia, PhD, a multidisciplinary scientist with expertise in oncology and infectious disease, Talby will present a session titled, Applying State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing for Personalized Healthcare.
  4. Advances (in NLP) over the last year, such as BERT and GPT-2, have been fundamentally changing the way we work with text-based data. However, it can be challenging for many users to figure out how to get started and apply them to their own datasets. In this session, ML engineer Brian Sacash and ML researcher Andrew Chang from Novetta will present State-of-the-art NLP Made Easy.
  5. ML pipelines are becoming increasingly important in pilot to production workflow. Michael Luk, PhD, CTO of SFL Scientific, will conduct a hands-on workshop on Developing Natural Language Processing Pipelines for Industry.

 

Deep Learning Tracks

  1. PyTorch continued to gain in popularity thanks to a gentler learning curve and more intuitive approach. Adam Paszke, Author & Maintainer of the PyTorch deep learning framework, will present on this open source work. 
  2. Reinforcement learning continues to find new use cases and adoption and is one of the best for sequential techniques for decision making and control policies. Leonardo De Marchi, Head of Data Science and Analytics, will present on Modern Reinforcement Learning.
  3. Graph applications are found everywhere: retail, computer science, natural language processing, cyber analytics, and many other fields. ML research Shauna Revay, PhD, will present on Graph Neural Networks and their Applications.
  4. TensorFlow 2 is amongst the most popular framework around and Dr. Jon Krohn, Chief Data Scientist, at Untapt and author of Deep Learning Illustrated will host in depth hands-on training session on this constantly evolving DL framework.  
  5. Gaining an intuition for the principles underlying modern neural networks, including multilayer perceptrons, autoencoders, CNNs, and RNNs, such as LSTM, is vital for any deep learning practitioner. Brandon Rohrer, PhD, and principal data scientist at iRobot will conduct a hands-on training session on Introduction to Deep Learning & Neural Networks I: Concepts.

Machine Learning Tracks

  1. Often called the “Father of Machine Learning”, Tom M. Mitchell, PhD, Interim Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, will be sharing his insights into the future of AI.
  2. Renowned data scientists, Dr. Kirk Borne will be providing a solution to Solving the Data Scientist’s Dilemma: the Cold-Start Problem with 10+ Machine Learning Examples.
  3. scikit-learn continues to be one of the most popular machine learning libraries and continues to evolve. Core contributor Andreas Mueller, PhD, will host an advanced machine learning training session focused on working on pipelines and evaluation metrics with scikit-learn.
  4. One of the leading practitioners in applying machine learning to finance, Gary Kazantsev, PhD, Head of Quant Technology Strategy at Bloomberg will discuss his research.
  5. Microsoft machine learning researcher and Climate Forecast Rodeo Challenge winner, Lester Mackey, PhD, will present on AI and Climate.

 

MLOps & Data Engineering Tracks

Kubeflow has enjoyed wide adoption across the ML and data science community thanks to its ability to make workflows on Kubernetes simple, portable and scalable. Members of the Kubeflow team will be discussing their work on this important workflow tool.

  1. A leading contributor to the open data community, Stanford Professor Matei Zaharia, author of Apache Spark and MLFlow, will be headlining our MLOps and Data Engineering track. 
  2. Understanding how massive tech companies handle the ML workflow and data engineering can be insightful and inspiring. Applied ML researcher at Facebook, Mohamed Fawzy, will present on Distributed Training Platform at Facebook.
  3. We’re delighted to host A.M. Turing Award Laureate Mike Stonebraker, PhD, and inventor of many modern databases, such as PostgreSQL and other key data engineering projects.
  4. Machine learning is quickly shifting to the cloud. Joy Payton, a cloud engineer, data scientist, and adjunct professor, will host a session on Data Science and Machine Learning in the Cloud for Cloud Novices.
  5. Machine learning model deployments can go wrong in so many ways. Luckily, Francesca Lazzeri, PhD, of Microsoft will give a talk, Training and Operationalizing Interpretable Machine Learning Models, on how to ensure that you never run into said problems.

 

Data Science + 

ODSC East 2020 will also feature more than just the above focus areas. Here are some notable extra sessions, events, and notes to make the most out of your ODSC East experience.

  1. We’re hosting our first annual Poster Sessions including travel grants. We encourage students to apply here.
  2. Our popular Women in Data Science Ignite Session will host over a dozen project presentations for rising stars in data science.
  3. Our Ai x Business Summit will host multiple tracks around industry verticals including finance, healthcare, pharma, retail, and more.
  4. Networking and making new connections is always an important part of each event. At ODSC East, you can enjoy extra events like Drinks & Dinner with Data Scientist, Meet the Speakers, multiple network receptions, and much more. 
  5. Don’t forget that data science is a team effort! Groups of 3 or more enjoy extra discounts.

 

All of this and more will define ODSC East 2020 this April 13-17 in Boston. Stay tuned for more info on speakers, keynotes, workshops, expo hall partners, and other updates. Register by this Friday, Jan. 31, to take advantage of our 50% off discount before prices go up at midnight.