Data Council: The Highlights of Day 1
Tags: conference, datascience, dataengineering, machinelearning
Published: 2023-03-23 05:44:54

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted how we work and learn, and the conference industry is no exception. Many events have moved to virtual formats, allowing attendees to participate from the comfort of their own homes. I even built a business around it! And while I absolutely love virtual events and can talk about their advantages endlessly, there's an undeniable charm to in-person conferences, too.

After **three years ** of remote work, I am thrilled to finally attend [the Data Council conference](https://www.datacouncil.ai/) in person in Austin and connect with fellow tech enthusiasts face-to-face as soon as next week!

The conference attracts diverse data professionals from various industries, and whilst I've been at events that featured data talks or data tracks and even organized a virtual data-focused conference myself, it's the first time when I have a chance to see so many professionals interested in the latest developments in data engineering, data science, machine learning, and AI.

Come say hi :wave: I'm also bringing [Bytewax's](https://bytewax.io/) swag that you don't want to miss, so [let's keep in touch!](https://join.slack.com/t/bytewaxcommunity/shared_invite/zt-1lhq9bxbr-T3CXxR_9RIUGb4qcBK26Qw).

Today I want to share some of the sessions that I found particularly exciting and would like to attend.

I have to split this post because it's too much to cover in one shot; you are reading about Day 1, March 28th.

## [Agenda](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T3dtBXeEyrujeg-5H8L5ncWKGuq3vMFYMyjriXWMAAI/edit)

The conference features an action-packed schedule across three days, including regular and lightning talks, workshops, and even speaker office hours.  The latter is especially helpful for newcomers to the community (like me), facilitating connections with experts.

Beyond the formal sessions, the conference also offers plenty of opportunities for informal networking (see [this thread](https://twitter.com/DataCouncilAI/status/1630994017679802371?s=20)). We (Bytewax) are organizing [#StreamBrew coffee](https://bit.ly/3YszNvd?r=lp) on March 29th in the morning (7:15 AM) and [#StreamBrew Beer](https://bit.ly/3ZGzRsw?r=lp) in the evening on March 30th.

No wonder that with so much to offer this conference is a must-attend event for data folks!

## Keynotes
As I said before, the conference's schedule is crowded, and keynotes are no exception. 2 on each day!

###  [Shirshanka Das "Building a Control Plane for Data"](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/building-a-control-plane-for-data?hsLang=en)
The conference kicks off with an exciting keynote by [Shirshanka Das](https://www.linkedin.com/in/shirshankadas/). Shirshanka is a co-founder and CEO of Acryl Data. He will discuss the control plane for data, a harmonizing layer powered by metadata that unifies data discovery, observability, quality, governance, and management. He will describe the fundamental characteristics of a control plane and explain the use cases that can be accomplished with a unified control plane.

I am obsessed with unification and simplification. It brings order and enables teams to work more effectively. Thrilled to hear Shirshanka's thoughts on how to do that for data stacks.

### [Jordan Tigani "Big Data is Dead" ](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/big-data-is-dead?hsLang=en)
Next up is [Jordan Tigani](https://twitter.com/jrdntgn) of MotherDuck with an intriguing title, "Big Data is Dead." The conference's website didn't have a description of the talk at the time I was writing this, but I googled and found [a fresh blog post](https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/) by Jordan. 
I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about the title as it sounds like clickbait (unrelated, but I have a background in Scala, and Scala is dead forever and dies every year again and again, so it's not news). 

Nonetheless, Jordan is exceptionally qualified to talk about this topic, he shares graphs based on query logs, deal post-mortems, benchmark results, customer support tickets, customer conversations, service logs, and published blog posts. He has his points and I won't post spoilers by citing his blog post. Besides, I am sure he has more to share in his keynote.

## Talks
There are three tracks on the day 1: 
* Data Engineering & Infra
* Data Science & Algos
* ML Ops & Platforms

It is challenging to choose what to highlight, and I might overlook or forget some talks, so if your favorite one is not on the list, please feel free to let me know on [our Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/bytewaxcommunity/shared_invite/zt-1lhq9bxbr-T3CXxR_9RIUGb4qcBK26Qw), or tag us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/bytewax) or [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/bytewax), [my DMs](https://twitter.com/Oli_kitty) are open too.


### [Chad Sanderson "Data Contracts: Accountable Data Quality."](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/data-contracts-accountable-data-quality?hsLang=en)
[Chad Sanderson](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-sanderson/) is the Founder of Data Quality Camp, and [the Data Quality Camp's Slack](https://join.slack.com/t/dataqualitycamp/shared_invite/zt-1rk5xsx5j-o3dnRa75iM1mY5~R9HWJMg) is the friendliest place to be. The channels are active, members are helpful, and you can even shamelessly promote whatever you want in the #be-shameless :D

If you're interested in the data contracts, then Chad's talk is definitely worth checking out. He recently [posted on his LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7044381753561497600/)  that it's going to be the most in-depth presentation yet on how they implemented data contracts at scale at Convoy.

You also want to attend Data Quality Camp's first-ever in-person happy hour on Monday the 27th at the Stay Put Brewery near the event venue.

### [Emily Curtin "Extinguishing the Garbage Fire of ML Testing"](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/extinguishing-the-garbage-fire-of-ml-testing?hsLang=en)
The abstract of [Emily Curtin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilymaycurtin)'s (Staff MLOps Engineer at Intuit Mailchimp) talk resonates with me, I also think that testing should be at the heart and mind of people implementing complex systems. Emily is focusing on testing in MLOps and Data Science, which I need to familiarize myself with, and I look forward to learning about it from her.

I also adore that she says in her bio that she gets paid to say "it depends" and "well actually."

### [Sophia Yang "How to Interpret & Explain Your Black-Box Models?"](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/how-to-interpret-and-explain-your-black-box-models?hsLang=en)
[Sophia Yang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiamyang?trk=public_profile_browsemap) is a Senior Data Scientist and a Developer Advocate at Anaconda. She is highly knowledgeable about technology and passionate about data science and Python open-source communities.
I think we share many interests, so I'm not missing her talk in which she covers popular model explanation techniques such as explainable boosting machine, visual analytics, distillation, prototypes, saliency map, counterfactual, feature visualization, LIME, SHAP, interpretML, and TCAV.


![Jules Damji at Data Love](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qot8zk7yk5b0uke5dwbm.jpg)
### [Jules Damji & Antoni Baum "HuggingFace + Ray AIR Integration: A Python Developer's Guide to Scaling Transformers"](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/huggingface-ray-air-integration-a-python-developers-guide-to-scaling-transformers?hsLang=en)
Last but not least, I want to highlight a talk by [Jules Damji](https://twitter.com/2twitme), who spoke at one of my events before (check out his handmade avatar from the pre Midjourney era). Jules and Antoni will talk about Hugging Face Transformers and Ray AIR. It's cutting-edge Machine Learning, and I'm always willing to discover more about it.

## Workshops
At Data Council all workshops are included for free in the cost of your ticket so I will try to attend them too.

### [Maggie Hays & Paul Logan "URGENT! Help these Pets Find Homes: Working Across Teams in DataHub"](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/urgent-help-these-pets-find-homes-working-across-teams-in-datahub?hsLang=en)
[Maggie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-hays/) and Paul's workshop is about Long Tail Companions (a hypothetical pet adoption service). It is in crisis – its data infrastructure has ground to a halt, and they cannot process any adoptions. I care about pets, love fixing failures, and enjoy teamwork. All things combined, it sounds like an excellent session for me.   

### [Erik Edelmann & Meredith Adler "How to Make Marketing Fall In Love with Data Modeling](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/how-to-make-marketing-fall-in-love-with-data-modeling?hsLang=en)
Data Modeling applied to marketing is obviously something that I care about. I'm joining [Erik](https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-edelmann-43247358) and Meredith for a demo of the campaign they built at Hightouch. They will cover how the team modeled the data, validated the results, and created a reusable process to support future marketing campaigns.

## 🎈Community party
The day wraps up with a Community Party at 5:30 pm (kudos to Databand for supporting it).


![Zander Matheson - getting real time](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/o17mfpl6gr7x1w5oa2or.png)
Don't forget to attend [Zander's awesome talk](https://www.datacouncil.ai/talks/getting-real-time-when-to-move-from-batch-to-streaming-and-how-to-do-it-without-hiring-an-entirely-new-team?hsLang=en), I'll be giving away awesome swag there!

Also see you at #StreamBrew, RSVP [here](https://bitly.com/m/bytewax).

In the next posts I'll cover following days, stay tuned!
See in Austin!

UPD: [Day 2](https://dev.to/bytewax/data-council-the-highlights-of-day-2-183e)