12 Beginner-Friendly Sessions You Shouldn’t Miss at ODSC East 2025
Whether you’re just getting started with AI or looking to sharpen your foundational skills, ODSC East 2025 has a stellar lineup of beginner-friendly sessions designed to make complex topics approachable, practical, and downright exciting. From real-time AI applications and storytelling with data, to deploying your own LLM-powered tools, this year’s beginner sessions promise actionable insights and hands-on learning to jumpstart your AI journey.
Here are 12 must-attend sessions created with new and aspiring data scientists, engineers, and AI-curious professionals in mind:
Building Machine Learning Models with Scikit-Learn
Michael Galarnyk, Learning Instructor | PhD Student at LinkedIn | Georgia Tech
Dive into one of the most popular open-source Python libraries for machine learning. This session walks through preprocessing, model selection, training, and evaluation, offering a practical foundation for anyone looking to break into ML with scikit-learn.
Introduction to Deep Learning
Brian Kulis, PhD, Associate Professor at Boston University
Perfect for those new to deep learning, this session introduces neural networks, backpropagation, and model training. With interactive examples and real-world context, you’ll walk away ready to start building your first deep models.
Practical Strategies for Data Storytelling
Ryan Harter, Senior Staff Data Scientist at Shopify
Great data storytelling drives decisions. Learn how to structure your insights, eliminate unnecessary complexity, and craft compelling narratives that resonate with stakeholders and drive action.
Unlock the Future of AI: Real-Time Voice & Video
Freddy Boulton, Software Engineer at Hugging Face
Real-time AI is here, and this session makes it accessible. Build your own Siri-like voice assistant using Python and FastRTC in under 100 lines of code while learning the fundamentals of audio/video streaming for AI.
Real-Time Delivery of Impressions at Scale
Tulika Bhatt, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix
Go behind the scenes at Netflix to learn how they deliver 18 billion impressions daily in near real-time. This talk explains the hybrid architecture powering adaptive recommendations, and how they balance performance, scalability, and cost.
Entity-Resolved Knowledge Graphs: Taking your Retrieval-Augmented Generation to the Next Level
Dr. Clair Sullivan, Founder and CEO at Clair Sullivan & Associates, LLC
Learn how to clean up and enhance knowledge graphs for better AI performance. This session explains how entity resolution works, why it matters, and how it improves LLM-driven applications by reducing noise and increasing precision.
Evals for Supercharging Your AI Agents
Aditya Palnitkar, Staff Software Engineer at Meta
Testing and monitoring are critical for LLM apps, especially when building agents. Learn how to design evaluation systems that simulate user interactions, catch hallucinations, and align results with business goals.
Structuring the Unstructured: Advanced Document Parsing for AI Workflows
Cedric Clyburn & William Caban, Product Manager & Senior Developer Advocate at Red Hat
If you’re working with PDFs, scanned files, or messy document formats, this session is for you. Learn how to transform unstructured content into clean, structured formats like JSON, ready for AI workflows and RAG pipelines.
Building and Deploying LLM Applications: Jupyter to Production in Streamlit and Beyond
Sudip Shrestha, PhD, Data Science and AI Lead at ASI Government
Take your LLM prototype from notebook to production. This workshop covers every step — from using OpenAI or Hugging Face models in Jupyter to deploying full apps with Streamlit, FastAPI, Docker, and GitHub.
Are Agents All You Need? A Practical Look at AI-Powered Knowledge Retrieval in Enterprise Systems
Rachel Shalom, Principal Data Scientist at Dell
Explore the practical side of building agent-based knowledge systems in the enterprise. Learn what agents are, how they work in real business environments, and how to evaluate their effectiveness and ROI.
Mastering DeepSeek V3 & R1: Advanced Prompt Engineering & AI Automation
Ivan Lourenço Gomes, Front-End Engineer & Technology Instructor at Daweb Schools
Learn how to unlock the full power of DeepSeek’s cutting-edge models through advanced prompt engineering and no-code automation. This session walks you through real-world use cases — from coding and customer support to marketing — and shows how to integrate AI into your workflows using tools like Ollama and Make.com.
Modular RAG Architectures: Integrating LLMs, Data Stores, and Prompt Engines
Ezequiel Lanza & Murilo Gustineli, Open Source AI Evangelist & Senior AI Software Solutions Engineer at Intel
Get a crash course in building modular RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) architectures using microservices. This talk shows how to combine LLMs, vector stores, and prompt engines into flexible, production-ready pipelines that deliver reliable results at scale.
Conclusion
AI is becoming more accessible than ever, and these beginner-focused sessions at ODSC East 2025 are your opportunity to get started with confidence. Whether you’re new to coding, exploring AI tools, or transitioning into a data role, these sessions are designed to give you a strong foundation, practical skills, and inspiration to keep learning.
Join us at ODSC East and be part of the next generation of AI practitioners! Use this link for an additional 10% off.
