Recapping ODSC West 2024: Our Biggest and Best One Yet!

It’s been a few weeks since we wrapped up ODSC West 2024, and we’re still reveling in everything that happened. Between the rockstar lineup of keynotes, massively attended hackathon, fun networking events, and everything else we had to offer, we’re walking away from the event as happy as can be. If you weren’t there, or if you just want to look back on the event, then this recap is for you. You can see more pics from the event here!

Top Sessions

With sessions both online and in-person in South San Francisco, 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:

• Tackling Socioeconomic Bias in Machine Learning
• Managing the Volatility of AI Applications
• Building High-Quality Domain-Specific Models with Mergekit: A Cost-Effective Approach Using Small Language Models
• Simulating Ourselves and Our Societies With Generative Agents
• Synthetic Data for Anonymization, Efficiency and Insights
• Getting Started with On-Device AI: Models and Local Inference SDK
• How to Build Your Own AI with Open Source and Hugging Face
• Building with Llama 3.2
• How AI Agents and Humans Can Work Together to Transform Our Work
• Generative Finance Without LLMs: Applying Probabilistic ML
• From ML Engineering to AI Engineering
• LLMs from Prototype to Production — LLMOps, Prompt Engineering, and Moving LLMs to the Cloud
• Accelerating Data Agents with cuDF Pandas
• Data Science in the Age of Generative AI
• How to Build an Interactive Front End for Your Python Data Science Models
• Powering AI with Endless Data from the Web
• Intro to AI Auditing — a guide for executives to navigate risk
• Building Reliable Coding Agents
• Reinforcement Learning with Large Datasets: a Path to Resourceful Autonomous Agents
• Function Calling with Llama-3 Running at 1,000 tokens/s
• Removing Hallucinations by 95% with Memory Tuning: A Technical Deep Dive
• Neural Operators: A new era of scientific computing

Interested in the top virtual sessions from ODSC West? You can check out the top session recordings here if you have a subscription to the Ai+ Training platform. We also have plenty of slides from the virtual side of ODSC West that you can see and download here.

Keynotes

Dr. Ali Arsanjani of Google Cloud

This year, we had some of the best and brightest in AI deliver keynote talks to a packed room on days 2 and 3 of ODSC West, as well as virtual keynotes for those logging in online.

In-person on Wednesday, Nick Becker, Product Leader in GPU-accelerated Data Science at NVIDIA discussed the next phase of accelerated computing; Chip Huyen, Storyteller at Tep Studio discussed AI engineering; and Dr. Ali Arsanjani, the Director of Applied AI Engineering at Google Cloud discussed infusing and scaling generative AI into businesses.

On Thursday, Sergey Levine, PhD, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and a Co-founder of Physical Intelligence discussed reinforcement learning with large datasets; Sharon Zhou, PhD, CEO & Co-Founder of Lamini discussed memory tuning; and Benjamin Mann, a Co-founder of Anthropic discussed the making of Claude.

Sharon Zhou of Lamini AI

Virtually, on Tuesday, Yohei Nakajima, the creator of Baby AGI and GP of Untapped Capital, spoke about the current and future state of autonomous agents. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Dr. Alfred Spector, a Visiting Scholar at MIT and Senior Advisor at Blackstone, spoke about applying AI efficiently. We even had a virtual fireside chat with Gary Marcus, PhD, Scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur.

Networking and Extra Events

As it is 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.

Spot, the Boston Dynamics dog, even made its triumphant return to an ODSC conference!

Also new to ODSC, Tesla attended and brought out its Tesla Bot and Cybertruck, which people could actually drive around the venue.

Hackathon

In one of the biggest hackathons ODSC has ever hosted, the NVIDIA Hackathon was incredibly popular! The winners were:

In-Person Hackathon:

1st Place: Shyamal Shah (L4)

2nd Place: DeepMind Ace: Feifan Liu, Himalaya Dua, Sara Zare

3rd Place: Lorenzo Mondragon

Virtual Hackathon:

1st Place: KeepLearning

2nd Place: Deep Visionaries

3rd Place: Anya Stetsenko

What’s next?

We still have plenty more for the year ahead! Right now, tickets are 75% off for a limited time for ODSC East 2025 coming up May 13th-15th in Boston! 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! Plus, it’s the 10th anniversary of ODSC East, so we’re planning some big things for it.