Highlights from DataHack Summit 2018 – a Truly Overwhelming and Resounding Success!
What do you do when you have to improve upon the best? When you need to deliver what has never been done before? And you need to deliver it at a scale which differentiates itself because of the scale.
These are some questions we had when we started thinking about DataHack Summit 2018.
We promised you an experience like never before – where we would bring together people, machines, and their collaborative experience. A chance to see artificial intelligence in a way no other conference in India has even shown.
And DataHack Summit 2018 delivered BIG!
With more than 1,200 attendees from various diverse industries and domains (more than 400 organizations), DataHack Summit 2018 was an unqualified success. This year’s conference was even bigger than last year, from the speaker line up and the enriching content, to the massive sprawling venue.
There were more than 50+ power talks and hack sessions from the best industry leaders, thought leaders, practitioners, data scientists, and folks from all sorts of data related roles. The venue, NIMHANS Convention Centre, was bigger and better than last year, with three massive auditoriums, all jam packed with data science professionals eager to learn from the best in the business.
We would like to thank all our sponsors for making DataHack Summit an unparalleled success.
And this was just about the first 2 days!
9 stimulating workshops (yes, 9!) were conducted on topics ranging from Applied Machine Learning to Computer Vision using PyTorch and we received an overwhelmingly positive response on them. Our aim of curating and delivering only the best data science knowledge to our community all culminated and reflected in our content at DataHack Summit 2018.
But enough talk – here are a few awesome highlights from the blockbuster conference!
Highlights from DataHack Summit 2018
Kunal Jain, the man behind Analytics Vidhya, kicked things off on Day 1 as he set the tone for entire conference with a superbly eloquent opening speech. He spoke about the significance of DataHack Summit and what lay in store for all the attendees. Kunal also spoke about the importance of ethics in AI later in the day, a very relevant and timely talk on a sensitive subject.
Ronald van Loon, Director at Adversitement and a well-respected thought leader, was the keynote speaker on day 1 of DataHack Summit 2018. He spoke about the future of data in the digital enterprise and kept the audience enraptured throughout his 60-minute talk.
Wondering how to get your data science career started? Then this panel discussion was the place to be! Featuring Ronald van Loon, Dr. Sarabjot Singh Anand, Rohit Pandharkar, Charanpreet Singh, and moderated by Kunal Jain, a range of topics were pondered upon, including how to make a career switch from an entirely different domain.
Throughout the conference, auditorium 3 saw the most love from the community. EVERY SINGLE talk and hack session was jam-packed as the audience flocked to audi 3 – as you can see in the image above! We have such a wonderful community that is so eager to learn new things, and that’s what keeps us working so hard to make DataHack Summit a fulfilling experience for everyone.
Recognize this person? Of course you do – it’s none other than Tarry Singh! He was one of the most sought-after speakers at the conference and he brought his relentless work ethic and supreme energy to the stage. Tarry was the keynote speaker on day 2, as he spoke about the different nuances of deep learning. He was also part of the panel discussion on GANs and conducted a very successful workshop for CxO’s on how to make the leap from a business executive to an AI leader.
Reinforcement Learning was a prevalent topic throughout the summit with eminent personalities like Professor Balaraman Ravindran and Xander Steenbrugge lending their voice to this crucial subject. In fact, Xander even took a live hack session on RL, showing how you can build your own intelligent agent that can play ATARI games!
The workshops we hosted just added to the uniqueness of DataHack Summit 2018. 9 interactive and fully sold out workshops were held on the following topics:
- Getting Started with Natural Language Processing
- Applied Machine Learning
- Computer Vision using PyTorch
- Getting Started with Deep Learning
- The Masterclass: How to Win Data Science Challenges?
- Machine Learning at Scale using SparkML for Big Data
- Intel Deep Learning Workshop
- Build a Predictive Machine Learning Model – Workshop by IBM
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Business Executive to AI leader – A CXO’s Invite-Only Roundtable Hands-On Workshop
Giving our community the chance to network with fellow professionals is something DataHack Summit excels at – and this year was no different. There were plenty of chances to connect with thought leaders, industry veterans and even intermediate level folks – whether it was during lunch, tea, or in-between sessions. We are proud to offer our community the chance to enhance their careers.
There were also a number of interactive booths at the venue, set up by Intel, IBM, H2O.ai, Praxis, and Great Learning. Attendees had a chance to interact with them and find out more about their offerings. Check out this interaction between a young data scientist and a robot – truly creating a place WHERE HUMANS MEET ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Startup Showcase track, introduced for the first time, was a massive success with Rice Inc., Empower Energy, and woroxogo brandishing their awesome machine learning-powered services.
And finally, a HUGE thanks to our team for putting this all together. This was truly a team effort spanning months of hard work that culminated in a successful conference. Kudos, and we can’t wait to see you all again next year!
Senior Editor at Analytics Vidhya. Data visualization practitioner who loves reading and delving deeper into the data science and machine learning arts. Always looking for new ways to improve processes using ML and AI.
