Natural Language Processing Track
NLP has seen rapid advances in recent years. With some of the sharpest minds in data science presenting, get the latest insights, natural language processing training, trends, and discoveries in data science languages, tools, topics – and beyond.
Connect with some of the most innovative people and ideas in the world of data science, while learning first-hand from core practitioners and contributors. Learn about the latest advancements and trends in NLP, including pre-trained models, with use-cases focusing on deep learning, speech-to text, and semantic search.
Some of Our Confirmed NLP & LLMs Speakers

Yaron Haviv
Yaron Haviv is a serial entrepreneur who has been applying his deep technological experience in AI, cloud, data and networking to leading startups and enterprises since the late 1990s. As the Co-Founder and CTO of Iguazio, Yaron drives the strategy for the company’s MLOps platform and led the shift towards the production-first approach to data science and catering to real-time AI use cases. He also initiated and built Nuclio, a leading open source serverless framework with over 4,000 Github stars and MLRun, a cutting-edge open source MLOps orchestration framework.
Prior to co-founding Iguazio in 2014, Yaron was the Vice President of Datacenter Solutions at Mellanox (now NVIDIA – NASDAQ: NVDA), where he led technology innovation, software development and solution integrations. He also served as the CTO and Vice President of R&D at Voltaire, a high-performance computing, IO and networking company which floated on the NYSE in 2007 and was later acquired by Mellanox (NASDAQ:MLNX).
Yaron is an active contributor to the CNCF Working Group and was one of the foundation’s first members. He sits on the Data Science Committee of the AI Infrastructure Alliance (AIIA), of which Iguazio is a founding member. He is co-authoring a book on Implementing MLOps in the Enterprise for O’Reilly. Yaron presents at major industry events worldwide and writes tech content for leading publications including TheNewStack, Hackernoon, DZone,Towards Data Science and more.
Implementing Gen AI in Practice(Track Keynote)

Jim Dowling
Jim Dowling is CEO of Hopsworks and an Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He is lead architect of the open-source Hopsworks Feature Store platform. He is the organizer of the annual feature store summit conference and featurestore.org community, as well as co-organizer of PyData Stockholm.
Personalizing LLMs with a Feature Store(Workshop)

Alison Cossette
Alison Cossette is a dynamic Data Science Strategist, Educator, and Podcast Host. As a Developer Advocate at Neo4j specializing in Graph Data Science, she brings a wealth of expertise to the field. With her strong technical background and exceptional communication skills, Alison bridges the gap between complex data science concepts and practical applications.
Alison’s passion for responsible AI shines through in her work. She actively promotes ethical and transparent AI practices and believes in the transformative potential of responsible AI for industries and society. Through her engagements with industry professionals, policymakers, and the public, she advocates for the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies.
Alison’s academic journey includes pursuing her Master of Science in Data Science program, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, at Northwestern University and research with Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Crowd Research Collective. Alison combines academic knowledge with real-world experience. She leverages this expertise to educate and empower individuals and organizations in the field of data science.
Overall, Alison Cossette’s multifaceted background, commitment to responsible AI, and expertise in data science make her a respected figure in the field. Through her role as a Developer Advocate at Neo4j and her podcast, she continues to drive innovation, education, and responsible practices in the exciting realm of data science and AI.
Bridging the Gap: Light Code Solutions to Uniting Social Science and Modern Knowledge Graphs(Workshop)

Michael Auli
Michael Auli is a principal research scientist/director at FAIR in Menlo Park, California. His work focuses on speech and NLP and he helped create projects such as wav2vec/data2vec, the widely used fairseq toolkit, the first modern feed-forward seq2seq models outperforming RNNs for NLP, and several top ranked submissions at the WMT news translation task in 2018 and 2019. Before that Michael was at Microsoft Research, where he did early work on neural machine translation and using neural language models for conversational applications. During his PhD at the University of Edinburgh he worked on natural language processing and parsing. http://michaelauli.github.io
General and Efficient Self-supervised Learning with data2vec(Talk)

Lukas Biewald
Lukas Biewald is the CEO and co-founder of Weights & Biases, a developer-first MLOps platform. He also co-founded Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), a pioneer in the ML data-labeling space. Figure Eight was acquired by Appen (APX) in 2019. Lukas has dedicated his career to optimizing ML workflows, teaching ML practitioners, making machine learning more accessible to all, and occasionally tinkering with robots.

Jerry Liu
Jerry is the co-founder/CEO of LlamaIndex, an open-source tool that provides a central data management/query interface for your LLM application. Before this, he has spent his career at the intersection of ML, research, and startups. He led the ML monitoring team at Robust Intelligence, did self-driving AI research at Uber ATG, and worked on recommendation systems at Quora. He graduated from Princeton in 2017 with a degree in CS.
Building LLM-powered Knowledge Workers over your Data with LlamaIndex(Workshop)

Rajiv Shah, PhD
Rajiv Shah is a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face who focuses on enabling enterprise teams to succeed with AI. Rajiv is a leading expert in the practical application of AI. Previously, he led data science enablement efforts across hundreds of data scientists at DataRobot. He was also a part of data science teams at Snorkel AI, Caterpillar, and State Farm. Rajiv is a widely recognized speaker on AI, published over 20 research papers, and received over 20 patents, including sports analytics, deep learning, and interpretability. Rajiv holds a PhD in Communications and a Juris Doctor from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. While earning his degrees, he received a fellowship in Digital Government from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also has a large following on AI-related short videos on Tik Tok and Instagram at @rajistics.
Evaluation Techniques for Large Language Models(Tutorial)

Amber Roberts
Amber Roberts is a ML Growth Lead at Arize AI, a ML observability company built for maintaining models in production. Previously, Amber was a product manager of AI at Splunk and the Head of Artificial Intelligence at Insight Data Science. A Carnegie Fellow, Amber has an MS in Astrophysics from the Universidad de Chile.
Troubleshooting Large Language Models in Production with Embeddings and Evals(Talk)

Walid S. Saba
Walid Saba is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. Prior to joining the institute in 2023, he worked at two Silicon Valley startups, focusing on conversational AI. This work included high-level roles as the principal AI scientist for telecommunications company Astound and CTO of software company Klangoo, where he helped develop its state-of-the-art digital content semantic engine (Magnet).
Saba’s career to date has seen him hold various positions in both the private sector and academia. His resume includes entities such as the American Institutes for Research, AT&T Bell Labs, IBM and Cognos, while he has also spent a cumulative seven years teaching computer science at the University of Ottawa, the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the University of Windsor (a public research university in Ontario, Canada), and the American University of Beirut (AUB).
Walid is frequent invited for interviews and as a keynote speaker on AI and NLP has published over 45 technical articles, including an award-winning paper that he presented at the German Artificial Intelligence Conference (KI-2008). Walid received his BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the University of Windsor, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from Carleton University in 1999.

Eli Chen
Eli is CTO and Co-Founder at Credo AI. He has led teams building secure and scalable software at companies like Netflix and Twitter. Eli has a passion for unraveling how things work and debugging hard problems. Whether it’s using cryptography to secure software systems or designing distributed system architecture, he is always excited to learn and tackle new challenges. Eli graduated with an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree from U.C. Berkeley.

Sinan Ozdemir
Sinan Ozdemir is a mathematician, data scientist, NLP expert, lecturer, and accomplished author. He is currently applying my extensive knowledge and experience in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) as the founder and CTO of LoopGenius, transforming the way entrepreneurs and startups market their products and services.
Simultaneously, he is providing advisory services in AI and LLMs to Tola Capital, an innovative investment firm. He has also worked as an AI author for Addison Wesley and Pearson, crafting comprehensive resources that help professionals navigate the complex field of AI and LLMs.
Previously, he served as the Director of Data Science at Directly, where my work significantly influenced their strategic direction. As an official member of the Forbes Technology Council from 2017 to 2021, he shared his insights on AI, machine learning, NLP, and emerging technologies-related business processes.
He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Pure Mathematics (Algebraic Geometry) from The Johns Hopkins University, and he is an alumnus of the Y Combinator program. Sinan actively contribute to society through various volunteering activities.
Sinan’s skill set is strongly endorsed by professionals from various sectors and includes data analysis, Python, statistics, AI, NLP, theoretical mathematics, data science, function analysis, data mining, algorithm development, machine learning, game-theoretic modeling, and various programming languages.
Aligning Open-source LLMs Using Reinforcement Learning from Feedback(Workshop)

Martin Musiol
Long before the buzz surrounding generative AI, Martin Musiol was already advocating for its significance in 2015. Since then, he has been a frequent speaker at conferences, podcasts, and panel discussions, addressing the technological advancements, practical applications, and ethical considerations of generative AI. Martin Musiol is a founder of generativeAI.net, a lecturer on AI to over 3000 students, and publisher of the newsletter ‘Generative AI: Short & Sweet’. As the lead for GenAI Projects in Europe at Infosys Consulting (previously at IBM), Martin Musiol helps companies globally harness the power of generative AI to gain a competitive advantage. -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinmusiol1/ and his webpage: https://generativeai.net/

Nirmal Budhathoki
Nirmal Budhathoki is a Senior Data Scientist, who is currently working at Microsoft in Cloud Security. Nirmal has over 12+ years of experience in the IT industry, including 5+ years in data science. Nirmal’s strong belief in continuous learning has led him to complete three master’s degrees with majors on: Information Systems, Business Administration, and Data Science. Nirmal loves to help the data science community and has completed over 600+ free mentoring sessions with aspiring data scientists to help them navigate their data science career. Nirmal also conducts mentored learning sessions for MiT’s Data Science and Machine Learning certification program in collaboration with Great Learning. Nirmal has experience working with the US government for the Department of Navy, and he is also a US army veteran. Nirmal yearns to solve data science problems that are aligned with product strategy and business outcomes. In his free time, Nirmal loves using this data science skills in sports analytics.

Mike Taylor
Mike is a data-driven, technical marketer who built a 50 person marketing agency (Ladder), and 300k people have taken his online courses (LinkedIn, Udemy, Vexpower). He now works freelance on generative AI projects, and is writing a book on Prompt Engineering for O’Reilly Media.

Sandeep Singh
Sandeep Singh is a leader in applied AI and computer vision in Silicon Valley’s mapping industry, and he is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technology to capture, analyze and understand satellite imagery, visual and location data. With a deep expertise in computer vision algorithms, machine learning and image processing and applied ethics, Sandeep is responsible for creating innovative solutions that enable mapping and navigation software to accurately and efficiently identify and interpret features to remove inefficiencies of logistics and mapping solutions. His work includes developing sophisticated image recognition systems, building 3D mapping models, and optimizing visual data processing pipelines for use in logistics, telecommunications and autonomous vehicles and other mapping applications. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and computer vision, Sandeep’s leadership is driving the future of applied AI forward.
Stable Diffusion: A New Frontier for Text-to-Image Paradigm(Workshop)
What You'll Learn
Talks & Workshops on these topics:
Topics
Natural Language Processing
NLP Transformers
Pre-trained Models
Text Analytics
Natural Language Understanding
Sentiment Analysis
Natural Language Generation
Speech Recognition
Named Entity Extraction
Models
BERT
XLNet
GPT-2
Transformers
Word2Vec
Deep Learning Models
RNN & LSTM
Machine Learning Models
ULMFiT
Transfer Learning
Tools
Tensorflow 2.0
Hugging Face Transformers
PyTorch
Theano
SpaCy
NLTK
AllenNLP
Stanford CoreNLP
Keras
FLAIR
ODSC WEST 2023 - Oct 30th – Nov 2nd
RegisterYou Will Meet
Some of the world’s best data science speakers
The brains and authors behind today’s most popular open data science tools, topics, and languages
Hundreds of attendees focused on data science
Chief Data Scientists
Thought leaders working in data science
Data Scientists and Analysts
Software Developers
CEOs, CTOs, CIOs
Data Visualization professionals
Venture Capitalists and Investors
Startup Founders and Executives
Attendees from Healthcare, Finance, Education, Business, Intelligence, and other industries
Big data and data science innovators
Why Attend?
Several of the best minds and biggest names in data science will be presenting
Network with attendees from leading data science companies to learn how others are tackling similar problems
Gain quality training in the hottest data science topics, tools, and languages
Learn the latest in data science from industry leaders without having to make room in the budget — tickets are surprisingly inexpensive
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