2021 Event and Data Science Community Highlights
2021 was a big year here at Formulatedby! Despite the current restrictions for event organizers, it’s been the year with the most events in our history. The focus on creating virtual and hybrid experiences allowed us to produce more content and engagement as well as reach an even broader audience with the Data Science Salon and our partners’ events. What first seemed as a huge threat turned into new opportunities and one of our best years. Let’s look back to some of the highlights and numbers.
Hosting ten thousand attendees at the NLP Summit
We’ve been collaborating with the AI company John Snow Labs for over two years and helped them launch their NLP Summit in October 2020. It featured 4 days of sessions and 4 days of trainings focusing on NLP trends and best practices, open source and NLP applications in healthcare. Over 7,000 attendees joined us virtually for the event and John Snow Labs decided to keep partnering with us and come back with two events the following year.
The first edition of the NLP Summit in 2021 focused on NLP applications for general industries and the other one on healthcare. The amazing community of John Snow Labs’ Spark NLP open source library had grown significantly since their first event in the previous year and over 10,000 attendees tuned in virtually to see over a hundred sessions from top NLP leaders, panels and training workshops and engage with each other.
We’re thankful for the partnership with John Snow Labs and are very excited to keep partnering with them for their upcoming Healthcare NLP Summit in April 2022.
Formulatedby helped us launch our webinar series, training workshops, and conference. They’re true experts, passionate, fast, listen well — and consistently deliver. Highly recommended!
David Talby, CTO at John Snow Labs
Closing the gender gap at the DSS Virtual events
Creating diverse tech communities and featuring gender balanced lineups has always been a key focus for us at Formulatedby. Thanks to the great female data science leaders out there who are willing to share their expertise and experience with the community, we were able to have over 50% female speakers at our Data Science Salon events this year.
The female data science community also actively contributed valuable content to our DSS Elevate blog, sharing job hunting tips for female data scientists or tips to deal with imposter syndrome. We’re also grateful for all the female forward communities such as Women in Analytics and Women Leading in AI that partner up with us to help each other reach a broader audience, create better content and make the data space more diverse.
Crating a space for the new MLOps community
MLOps has probably been one of the biggest trends in data science in 2021 and we’re thankful for our collaboration with Verta, one of the top model management and operations platform providers. Given that MLOps is a novel approach to data science and data engineering, opinion sharing and the exchange of ideas and best practices is particularly important to this community.
Verta replied to this need of the community by launching a webinar series and the virtual MLOps Salons in collaboration with Formulatedby. Speakers from Stitch Fix, DoorDash, Stanford University, Finastra and many more shared their insights on how to successfully build and deploy ML models in the real world.
Gathering the community at the first DSS Hybrid event in Miami
While most of the DSS experiences were held online in 2021, we kicked off the new DSS Hybrid event format at the Miami Machine Learning Meetup Week in September. Together with our amazing friends from local and national data science communities including R-Ladies, South Florida Tech Hub, FIU, TigerGraph, IBM and Texas A&M University we gathered on three evenings to cover expert talks on R, Python, Deep Learning, Data Governance, MLOps and Data Science in the Enterprise. It was incredible to see how fast the local community is growing and how active it is. We’re already very excited to be back in our hometown of Miami with the DSS Hybrid coming up in February 2022!
Other big highlight this year were the launch of the DSS Community Network and the celebration of the 5th anniversary of the Data Science Salon. It’s been an incredible journey, which we recapped in this blog post.
We’re looking forward to growing and engaging with the data science community in 2022 and creating unique experiences for data science practitioners and decision makers.
Are you thinking of hosting a virtual or hybrid experience for your company in 2022? Get in touch with us here, we’d love to share our experience with you!
