Our mission at Shopify is to make commerce better for everyone. Doing this in the long term requires constant learning and development – which happen to be core values here at Shopify.
Learning and development aren’t exclusively internal endeavors, they also depend on broadening your horizons and gaining insight from what others are doing in your field. One of our favorite formats for learning are conferences.
Conferences are an excellent way to hear from peers about the latest applications, techniques, and use cases in data science. They’re also great for networking and getting involved in the larger data community.
We asked our data scientists and engineers to curate a list of the top upcoming data conferences for 2022. Whether you’re looking for a virtual conference or in-person learning, we’ve got something that works for everyone.
Hybrid Events
Data + AI Summit 2022
When: June 27-30
Where: Virtual or in-person (San Francisco)
The Data + AI Summit 2022 is a global event that provides access to some of the top experts in the data industry through keynotes, technical sessions, hands-on training, and networking. This four-day event explores various topics and technologies ranging from business intelligence, data analytics, and machine learning, to working with Presto, Looker, and Kedro. There’s great content on how to leverage open source technology (like Spark) to develop practical ways of dealing with large volumes of data. I definitely walked away with newfound knowledge.
Ehsan K. Asl, Senior Data Engineer
Transform 2022
When: July 19-28
Where: Virtual or in-person (San Francisco)
Transform 2022 offers three concentrated events over an action-packed two weeks. The first event—The Data & AI Executive Summit—provides a leadership lens on real-world experiences and successes in applying data and AI. The following two events—The Data Week and The AI & Edge Week—dive deep into the most relevant topics in data science across industry tracks like retail, finance, and healthcare. Transform’s approach to showcasing various industry use cases is one of the reasons this is such a great conference. I find hearing how other industries are practically applying AI can help you find unique solutions to challenges in your own industry.
Ella Hilal, VP of Data Science
RecSys 2022
When: September 18-23
Where: Virtual & In-person (Seattle)
RecSys is a conference dedicated to sharing the latest developments, techniques, and use cases in recommender systems. The conference has both a research track and industry track, allowing for different types of talks and perspectives from the field. The industry track is particularly interesting, since you get to hear about real-world recommender use cases and challenges from leading companies. Expect talks and workshops to be centered around applications of recommender systems in various settings (fashion, ecommerce, media, etc), reinforcement learning, evaluation and metrics, and bias and fairness.
Chen Karako, Data Scientist Lead
ODSC West
When: November 1-3
Where: Virtual or in-person (San Francisco)
ODSC West is a great opportunity to connect with the larger data science community and contribute your ideas to the open source ecosystem. Attend to hear keynotes on topics like machine learning, MLOps, natural language processing, big data analytics, and new frontiers in research. On top of in-depth technical talks, there’s a pre-conference bootcamp on programming, mathematics or statistics, a career expo, and opportunities to connect with experts in the industry.
Ryan Harter, Senior Staff Data Scientist
In-person Events
PyData London 2022
When: June 17-19
Where: London
PyData is a community of data scientists and data engineers who use and develop a variety of open source data tools. The organization has a number of events around the world, but PyData London is one of its larger events. You can expect the first day to be tutorials providing walkthroughs on methods like data validation and training object detection with small datasets. The remaining two days are filled with talks on practical topics like solving real-world business problems with Bayesian modeling. Catch Shopify at this year’s PyData London event.
Micayla Wood, Data Brand & Comms Senior Manager
KDD 2022
When: August 14-18
Where: Washington D.C.
KDD is a highly research-focused event and home to some of the data industry’s top innovations like personalized advertising and recommender systems. Keynote speakers range from academics to industry professionals, and policy leaders, and each talk is accompanied by well-written papers for easy reference. I find this is one of the best conferences to keep in touch with the industry trends and I’ve actually applied what I learned from attending KDD to the work that I do.
Vincent Chio, Data Science Manager
Re-Work Deep Learning Summit
When: November 9-10
Where: Toronto
The Re-Work Deep Learning Summit focuses on showcasing the learnings from the latest advancements in AI and how businesses are applying them in the real world. With content focusing on areas like computer vision, pattern recognition, generative models, and neural networks, it was great to hear speakers not only share successes, but also the challenges that still lie in the application of AI. While I’m personally not a machine learning engineer, I still found the content approachable and interesting, especially the talks on how to set up practical ETL pipelines for machine learning applications.
Ehsan K. Asl, Senior Data Engineer
Crunch
When: October 3-5
Where: Budapest
Crunch is a data science conference focused on sharing the industry’s top use cases for using data to scale a business. With talks and workshops around areas like the latest data science trends and tools, how to build effective data teams, and machine learning at scale, Crunch has great content and opportunities to meet other data scientists from around Europe. With their partner conferences (Impact and Amuse) you also have a chance to listen in to interesting and relevant product and UX talks.
Yizhar (Izzy) Toren, Senior Data Scientist
Rebekah Morgan is a Copy Editor on Shopify's Data Brand & Comms team.
Are you passionate about data discovery and eager to learn more, we’re always hiring! Visit our Data Science and Engineering career page to find out about our open positions. Join our remote team and work (almost) anywhere. Learn about how we’re hiring to design the future together—a future that is digital by design.