Data Science Summit 2017

An African tale says that in Taubiland there lived in ancient, ancient times a man who possessed all the wisdom of the world. He hid all the wisdom in a jug. One day when he climbed a tree to hide the jug, his son gave him some advice about climbing ( a lesson of wisdom, which was supposed  to be in the jug). His disappointment was so great that, with all of his might, he threw the jug of wisdom as far as he could. The jug hit a rock and broke into a million pieces. As you might expect, all of the wisdom of the world that was inside spilled out, spreading throughout the land.

3 years ago, after running several successful meetups that expanded to a full day, Danny Bickson, Avner Algom and I decided to found the Data Science Summit. A non-profit event organized by the analytics community for the community. We wanted to gather great wise talks from around the world and share those among our community members in order to support its growth. From the start we had the support of Ben Lorica, Chief Data Scientist at O’Reilly Media, Inc., who is the Program Director of both the Strata Data Conference and the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference. We focused on bringing great speakers from around the world that deal with hard problems and present state of the art solutions in industry and academy.

The 1st conference, two years ago, sold out a day before the conference with 800 participants. The 2nd conference  sold out 4 days prior to the conference with 1000 participants. We increased the number of parallel tracks to 5 ( including a research track ) and had more speakers from abroad. This year, in May 29th,the 3rd  Data Science Summit (DSS) Europe will be in Jerusalem. The conference this year is led by representatives from Intel, O’Reilly Media, Bar Ilan University, eBay, IBM and Yahoo. The 5 tracks will focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning and distributed analytics. This year we will also including a research track.

We publish the agenda and speakers’ information, we still missing the research track that we will update next week. This year we will have a record number of speakers with over 50 talks, 15 out of them coming from abroad. The artificial intelligence track will include state of the art topics in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning (RL), for example, Dr. Roy Fox, a post doc at Berkeley RISE Lab (The successor lab for AMPLab and Spark creator) will present “Deep Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Made Fast and Easy with Ray”, Ray is the new system for RL out of Berkeley. Prof. Naftali Tishby from the Hebrew University will “A Deeper Understanding of Deep Learning”.

We will have this year two tracks on Machine Learning with a focus on Recommendation Systems, Vision and Ramping ML to Production. Dr. David Talby from Atigeo will present “When models go rogue: Hard earned lessons about using machine learning in production” and Dr. Amir Ronen from Spark Beyond will present “Explaining Predictions with Automatic Machine Learning”.

In the Distributed Analytics track we will focus on Stream Analytics and Distributed Machine Learning, Dr. Ian Stokes Rees from Continuum Analytics will present DASK, a distributed platform for data scientists. Xiaodong Wang from Intel will present BigDL, a native implementation of deep learning in Spark.

Those talks are only the tip of the iceberg, I encourage you to explore our agenda. We will have many more speakers from Israel and abroad from GE, Google, IBM, Microsft, MobilEye, Outbrain, PayPal, Red Hat, vast number of startups and universities across Israel.

This year as always, we aim to have the best conference for our community. We gathered your feedbacks from last year in order to improve the conference, e.g. by reducing the keynotes length, increasing the technical depth of the talks and improving transitions between the talks. We are not aiming to expand the conference beyond 1000 people, so we may be sold out earlier. I hope to see you in Jerusalem on May 29th, you can register here if you did not do it already.