The MinneAnalytics Big Data Tech conference is on Tuesday! This is the first time I’ve helped plan a major conference, and along with the rest of the conference committee, I’m incredibly excited to see it happen.
Here are a few things to know if you’re planning to attend the event:
- This will be the largest MinneAnalytics event ever with more than 1,200 registrations and 50 sessions. Eighteen sponsors have generously donated in order to keep the event free for everyone!
- Many of our speakers are nationally recognized. Sri Ambati is CEO of H2O, one of the fastest growing data science startups. Amy O’Connor of Cloudera was recently listed as one of the nation’s most influential women in data science. Larry Werth founded the early computer vision startup PPT Vision, and is working on a new company that he’ll tell us about. Lisa Schlosser is CTO of FindLaw, the largest directory of legal resources. Sean Kandel is CEO of Trifacta, a platform for data wrangling for Hadoop.
- You may not have heard of our speaker Ben Ortega, but you have probably used his product. GovDelivery sends messages to over 100 million people on behalf of local governments, warning of snow emergencies, road closures, and other critical information.
- We’ll have free training in Spark and Python, offered by premier commercial training partners. These classes would cost thousands of dollars on their own! Please bring your own laptop for Python training (the Spark training will be in a computer lab).
- Do you want to meet IBM Watson? Watson will be making a special appearance from 10:45 to 1:45 in the 2nd floor atrium area.
- MinneAnalytics is a completely volunteer-run organization! Some of us have been planning this event for more than six months. Any extra sponsorship funds are donated to a MinneAnalytics Scholarship Fund.
- You can access the schedule on your phone at this link. Also, don’t forget to try myKrowd, our new app that helps you connect with colleagues who are also attending.
- Say cheese! We’re offering free professional profile photos at the event.
- We’ll have free time at the end of the day for 5-minute Lightning Talks. Just come with an idea! It’s a great way to get the word out about what you’re working on or practice for a longer presentation.
- Pat Delaney will be delivering a talk using only the 1000 most common words in the English language! Make time at 3:45 to see how that is possible.
- One of our speakers is an actual, real-life dinosaur paleontologist. But you’ll have to read the speaker bios to find out which one.
- And last but not least … don’t forget to stay for our Networking Social, with Surly beer for everyone!
Thanks for attending, and I look forward to seeing you there!
Daniel Feldman is co-chair of Big Data Tech 2016. This article was originally published on LinkedIn here. Tweet @d_feldman