ODSC East 2024 Recap in Pictures

ODSC East is now a part of our history books, and we couldn’t be happier with how everything turned out. We held some fun networking sessions, our first-ever and in-person Generative AI Summit, more book signings, exciting keynotes, and plenty of sessions to fit everyone’s needs. You can see our photos from the event here, and be sure to follow our YouTube for virtual highlights from the conference as well.

Top Sessions

With sessions both online and in-person in Boston, there was something for everyone at ODSC East. We had bigger sessions on getting started with machine learning or SQL, up to advanced topics in NLP, and of course, plenty related to large language models and generative AI.

Some of our most popular in-person sessions at ODSC East were:

• Alex Pentland, PhD Professor | Founder and Director MIT | MIT Connection Science AI and Society
• Rudina Seseri Founder and Managing Partner Glasswing Ventures Identifying AI Use Cases for Maximum Business Value
• Valentina Alto Azure Specialist — Data and Artificial Intelligence Microsoft Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation
• Andrew Lamb Chair of the Apache Arrow Program Management Committee | Staff Software Engineer InfluxData Tutorial: Introduction to Apache Arrow and Apache Parquet, using Python and Pyarrow
• Tamilla Triantoro, PhD Associate Professor, Business Analytics Quinnipiac University Data Synthesis, Augmentation, and NLP Insights with LLMs
• Julien Simon Chief Evangelist Hugging Face Open-source AI with Hugging Face
• Mingo Sanchez Senior Sales Engineer Plotly How to Build an Interactive Front End for Your Python Data Science Models
• Roy Hasson VP of Product Upsolver Breaking the ice: How Apache Iceberg is revolutionizing the modern data & AI stack
• Tathagata Das Staff Software Engineer Databricks Designing ETL Pipelines with Delta Lake and Structured Streaming — How to Architect Things Right

Popular ODSC East virtual sessions:

• End-to-End Speech Recognition: The Journey from Research to Production: Tara Sainath, PhD | Principal Research Scientist | Google DeepMind
• Beyond Theory: Effective Strategies for Bringing Generative AI into Production: Heiko Hotz | Generative AI Global Blackbelt | Google
• The Promise of Edge ML: Bringing Your Model to Your Data: David Aronchick | CEO | Expanso
• CodeLlama: Open Foundation Models for Code: Baptiste Roziere | Research Scientist | Meta
• Deciphering Data Architectures (choosing between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh): James Serra | Data & AI Architect | Microsoft

You can watch the top virtual sessions for free here on Ai+ Training and watch all of the virtual keynotes and other free sessions here.

Keynotes

Both in-person and virtually, we had some amazing keynote speakers who told the audience about their research, expertise, use cases, or state-of-the-art developments.

On the virtual side of things, we had a number of amazing keynote speakers:

• Setting Up Text Processing Models for Success: Formal Representations versus Large Language Models: Carolyn Rosé, PhD | Professor, Program Director for the Masters of Computational Data Science | Carnegie Mellon University
• Deep Reinforcement Learning in the Real World: From Chip Design to LLMs: Anna Goldie | Senior Staff Research Scientist | Google DeepMind
• Social and Ethical Implications of Generative AI: Abeba Birhane | Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI, Adjunct Lecturer/Assistant Professor | Mozilla Foundation, Trinity College Dublin

Over in Boston, we had a keynote for each day of the event. On Wednesday, Kate Soule, Program Director for Generative AI Research at IBM spoke about trust and transparency in generative AI. After that, Hilke Schellmann, Author of “The Algorithm” and Assistant Professor of Journalism at New York University discussed how people can use AI the right way in decision-making.

On Thursday, we had two more keynotes. First, Cathy O’Neil, Ph.D., CEO and Data Scientist at ORCAA and author of the NYT best-seller “Weapons of Math Destruction” spoke about algorithmic auditing, while afterward, Dr. Bill) W. Streilein, Chief Technology Officer at the DoD Chief Digital and AI Office, discussed how the DoD uses AI in decision-making.

Networking & Other Events

Always a highlight and crowd-pleasure of ODSC conferences, the networking events during the week were well-deserved after long days of data science training sessions. Each day we had at least one book signing where attendees could meet some of their favorite data science book authors and get their questions answered — and those who showed up early enough, even got their book signed.

We also brought back Lightning talks, which saw a small group of victims (speakers) describe slides picked at random. Prior to these talks, we gathered completely random slides from sessions during the week and shuffled them up, so all speakers didn’t know what slides they were going to have to talk about. To quote one attendee, “I felt so bad for the speakers — they didn’t seem like they knew their topics well. But then I found out that these slides were totally random and realized how fun this was!”

We were even visited by a puppy! Though, this was a Boston Dynamics dog — still a very good dog!

What’s next?

We still have plenty more for the year ahead! Right now, tickets are 75% off for a limited time for both ODSC Europe this September 5th-6th and ODSC West this October 29th-31st! That means tickets will only go up in price, so if you’re on the fence about going, let this be the decision-maker for you. Register now before ticket prices go up!

Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com

Read more data science articles on OpenDataScience.com, including tutorials and guides from beginner to advanced levels! Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here and receive the latest news every Thursday. You can also get data science training on-demand wherever you are with our Ai+ Training platform. Interested in attending an ODSC event? Learn more about our upcoming events here.