Your Guide To ODSC East 2018: 4 Pathways to Pursue

We are two weeks away from the ODSC East 2018 conference, which will take place in downtown Boston. At this two week mark, we present a guide to ODSC East 2018 that outlines different pathways that you, as a conference goer, can take and use to max out your conference going experience. 

As one of the biggest conferences in the fields of AI and Big Data, ODSC East brings together thousands of people ranging from developers to scientists to students together.  The four-day event features dozens of workshops, training sessions, and talks from a collection of some of most reputable names in machine learning, data engineering, academia business and more.

In a perfect world, you’d be able to attend as many events as your mind desires.  Given the plethora options offered by the conference, the team at ODSC has created four paths catered to groups of people with different backgrounds and experiences. These pathways feature “do-not-miss” training sessions, workshops and talks. We hope you can use this guide to ODSC East 2018 to help you maximize your conference experience.

The Newbie

You:

• Taken some courses from online platforms like DataCamp or Udacity
• Overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of online resources
• Only have experienced data science through the URL and now you’re ready to see and feel it IRL.

Recommended Conference Pathway for The Newbie:

• May 1

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Machine Learning in R Part 1
  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: A Tour of Machine Learning Algorithms
  • 9:30 AM Keynote Address w/ Alex Sandy Pentland
  • 10:05 AM Keynote Address w/ Amy O Connor
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Introduction to Python for Data Science

• May 2

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Introduction to Machine Learning
  • 9:00 AM Applying Color to Visual Analytics in Data Science
  • 10:05 AM Keynote Address w/ Dr. Kirk Borne
  • 11:30 AM How to Visualize Your Data: Beyond the Eye into the Brain
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Network/Graph Analysis in Python

• May 3

  • 11:10 AM Using Data for Good
  • 11:55 AM Data Science State of the Union, 2018
  • 2:00 PM An Introduction to Emoji Data Science
  • 5:00 PM Data Science at Square: from Menu Recommendations to Economic Empowerment

• May 4

  • 9:45 AM Technical Track/ Models and Methods/ Data and Training
  • 11:10 AM Bayesian Statistics Made Simple
  • 2:00 PM From Numbers to Narrative: Data Storytelling

The Deep Learner/AI Evangelist

You:

• Riding shotgun on the AI hype train
• Use a neural network model in situations where a simple logistic regression will do just fine
• More than happy to explain that AI won’t take all our jobs and in fact will add jobs
• Subscribed to an unnecessary number of AI newsletters and follow anyone on Twitter with #AI in their bio

Recommended Conference Pathway for The Deep Learner/AI Evangelist:

• May 1:

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Deep Learning Techniques for Vision
  • 11:10 AM Intersection of AI & BlockChain in Healthcare
  • 1:30 PM Panel:User Design and Experience with AI
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Fake News Detection with Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • 2:45 PM What to expect in the next 5 to 10+ years in AI?
  • 4:00 PM Building an effective AI practice
  • 4:30 PM The Adoption of AI in Business: Opportunities and Challenges

• May 2:

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Pre-trained models, Transfer Learning and Advanced Keras Features
  • 11:10 AM Applying AI for Clinical Variation and Population Risk Assessment
  • 11:30 AM Deep Learning in Finance
  • 2:00 PM A Primer on Neural Network Models for Natural Language Processing

• May 3

  • 11:10 AM Applying Deep Learning to Article Embedding for Fake News Evaluation
  • 2:00 PM Deep Learning Methods for Text Classification
  • 4:20 PM Deep Learning for Developers
  • 4:20 PM Keras for R

• May 4

  • 11:10 AM Democratise Conversational AI – Scaling Academic Research to Industrial Applications
  • 11:10 AM Interpretable AI: Can we trust machine learning?
  • 3:00 PM Monitoring AI Applications with A

Business Executive/Networker

You:

• Liaison/translator between your data team and the rest of the company
• Your company asks you to find if they really need to invest in [insert expensive hyped technology here]
• Might as well have “Your Network is Your Net Worth” tattooed on your body

Recommended Conference Pathway for The Business Executive/Networker:

• May 1

  • 9:30 AM Keynote Address w/ Alex Sandy Pentland
  • 10:05 AM Keynote Address w/ Amy Oconnor
  • 11:10 AM Machine Learning Powers Better Decisioning in Financial Services
  • 1:00 PM Network and Accelerate AI Lunch Breaks
  • 1:30 PM Panel:User Design and Experience with AI
  • 2:45 PM What to expect in the next 5 to 10+ years in AI?
  • 2:45 PM Mission Analytics: Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
  • 4:00 PM Building an effective AI practice
  • 4:30 PM ML and AI for Executives
  • 4:30 PM The Adoption of AI in Business
  • 5:00 PM It’s the art, not the science, that makes data science work
  • 5:00 PM Accelerate AI Networking Reception

• May 2

  • 10:05 AM Keynote Address w/ Dr. Kirk Borne
  • 11:40 AM AI and Convergence in Banking and FinTech
  • 11:40 AM Product-Data Fit: The Lean Startup Methodology and AI Products
  • 1:00 PM Network and Accelerate AI Lunch Breaks
  • 1:30 PM Cross Industry Panel:The impact of AI across the enterprise
  • 2:15 PM How to win with AI and Blockchain: Lessons from the early adopters
  • 2:45 PM AI and Data Science in Investment
  • 4:00 PM Marketing in a Machine Learning World
  • 4:30 PM Finance Panel: Demystifying AI for the Enterprise
  • 5:00 PM Accelerate AI Networking Reception
  • 5:30 PM End of Day Networking Session

If you are a business professional and want to take your organization’s AI experience to the next level, also check out Accelerate AI which occurs during ODSC East.

The Researcher/ML Nerd

You:

• Have placed in the top 10% in more than one Kaggle competition
• Rather spend free time at the conference on working on your hobby projects than exchanging business cards
• Can code several machine learning algorithms from scratch
• Most likely ask the speaker/presenter “Will the code will be posted on Github later?”

Recommended Conference Pathway for The Researcher:

• May 1

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Deep Learning Techniques for Vision
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Geometric deep learning on graphs and manifolds – going beyond Euclidean data
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: NLP with Python: Key Methods and Tools, and an Application of word2vec to Word & Phrase Translation
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Networking Analysis Made Simple

• May 2

  • 9:00 AM General Training Session: Pre-trained models, Transfer Learning and Advanced Keras Features
  • 11:30 AM How to Visualize Your Data: Beyond the Eye into the Brain
  • 2:00 PM General Training Session: Optimizing Hadoop Environments
  • 2:00 PM Visual Analytics for High Dimensional Data
  • 4:30 PM Under The Hood: Creating Your Own Spark Datasources

• May 3

  • 11:10 AM Deep Learning Pipelines for Big Images: How to Revolutionize an Industry
  • 11:10 AM Applying Deep Learning to Article Embedding for Fake News Evaluation
  • 11:55 AM Natural Language Understanding at Scale on Apache Spark
  • 2:00 PM Clinical Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning
  • 2:50 PM Data Lake Analytics: Analyzing Millions of NYC Taxi Trips
  • 2:50 PM Mining Tools for Large-Scale Networks
  • 4:20 PM Deep Learning for Developers
  • 4:20 PM Long Term Time Series Forecasting with Recurrent Neural Networks
  • 5:10 PM Recommending the Best Value Hotels at Tripadvisor

• May 4

  • 11:10 AM Racial Bias in Facial Recognition Software
  • 11:10 AM Power up your Computer Vision skills with TensorFlow-Keras
  • 11:55 AM Latent Variable Matrix Estimation via Collaborative Filtering
  • 2:00 PM How AI-Powered Natural Language Processing of Social Data is Fueling a New Generation of Predictive Analysis
  • 3:00 PM Enter the Matrix: Unsupervised feature learning with matrix decomposition to discover hidden knowledge in high dimensional data
  • 3:00 PM Making the Most of Petabases of Genomic Data
  • 4:00 PM Making Sense of the Biomedical Literature via Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

For 4 days in Boston, the brightest minds in the data science and AI world come together. Be sure to take full advantage of not only the conference but also the workshops, the “Meet the Speakers” sessions, the career fair, ODSC’s Startup Showcase and more.