ODSC West 2017 Recap

Editor’s note: The moment you’ve been waiting for: The ODSC West 2017 Recordings are now edited, and we will distribute them THIS WEEK. Keep learning, pre-register for our upcoming webinar and get ready for ODSC East 2018.

Last month, another successful edition of the Open Data Science Conference occurred at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport hotel. The third and final event of the year attracted over 2000 professionals from the fields of data science, statistics, big data, artificial intelligence, and more. The diverse group of attendees included people from every career stage from interns to executive and had a sizeable international attendance as well. With AI at its peak popularity, ODSC West 2017 was the perfect event to satisfy the immense curiosity around the burgeoning field.

The main draw of the conference as always was the abundance of world-class talent from the dozens of speakers and presenters. Some of the biggest names in big data and AI such as Andreas Muller and DJ Patil were on hand to impart their knowledge and advice onto eager ears. Competition for talks was fierce and in many cases presentations occurred before a packed house.

Some of the most popular presentations/talks were “The State of Conversational AI” by Mariya Yao, “Deep Neural Networks with Keras” by Sri Krishnamurthy, and “Emoji Data Science” by Hamdan Azhar which was arguably the most fun event of the conference. The presentations were reflective of the data science discourse at large, with a strong focus on deep learning and AI. There were very few points during the conference where there was not an event dedicated to AI or deep learning.

While some attendees were astutely paying attention to panels on Chatbots and the Blockchain, some were making the rounds at the career fair exploiting the opportunity to meet face to face with some most desirable companies hiring for data talent. This was certainly true for Skip Everling, who recently graduated from the Metis data science boot camp. His favorite talk of the conference was “The Little Extra Between an Ordinary and Extraordinary Data Scientist” by Ahsan Reman because Reman’s “Talk helped me to understand how I can stand out as a data scientist, and how to market myself as I explore for my next opportunity” says Everling.

If you’re interested in attending the next Open Data Science Conference, it’ll be taking place in Boston in May 2018. Keep your eye on this space for more information in the upcoming months.

©ODSC2017