 And welcome to ODSC India. The mic just kicked down. Great to see so many people here. Room is packed. First of all, thank you for a wonderful keynote. I think it was very appropriate, given your connection to ODSC, which I'll talk a little bit about later, that you introduced this morning's keynote. Sorry that you conducted this morning's keynote, rather to say. So I've got to say for myself, it's wonderful to see so many of you back here again. This is ODSC's second event. And for myself, I have to say it's wonderful to be here. Last year was my first time in India ever. I've got to say it's a fantastic country. It was a lifelong ambition to get here. I got to see Delhi last year. I got to see Agra, a few other places. So hopefully this time I'll get to explore a little more Bangalore. Last year was so busy that I didn't get to go out much. But this year, I definitely plan to change that. I want to thank Nuresh and his team here, DP, and everyone else for a hugely successful event last year and building this one up. And last year, I just want to take about 10 minutes. But one thing that struck me last year when I was here was how vibrant and how passionate the data science community here in India is. And it really made me think that data science really is a global community. Because before India, we're very focused on the US and Europe where I'm from. So I want to tell you a little bit about that. But first, foremost, I want to thank all the wonderful ODSC India speakers. These are the men and women whose contribution is their passion, their drive is really moving data science forward. So we have a wonderful lineup for you over the next two days. You've already heard from one great speaker. And there's many more to come. And we've got many speakers from different countries as well, not just from here from India. So I want to thank especially those who travel from near and far. And we are very grateful for your insights. ODSC is, even though I'm Irish myself and we have a very international team, is based out of Boston. So we really cannot take any credit for this event. As I said earlier, this pretty much this whole event has to go down to the thanks has to go to Noresh, especially his organization committee and his speaker committee. And I have to say, I've been especially impressed with their relentless drive to make this a better event and make sure that the content that you do receive is of the highest caliber. And that's one of the things I'm really glad we partners with Noresh over because he's done a fantastic job on that. So really can't thank him enough. I would have liked, of course, to thank our sponsors without which this event would not be possible. There's some lovely people out there in the hallway, so do take a chance and go speak to them. I know ODSC is very much about open source data science. We love open source data science. But many of you out there are building data science projects and all that good stuff. And there is a build versus buy this station. So do talk to some of our sponsors and understand what they're working on. I think they'll be very beneficial. So as mentioned, ODSC kind of occurred by accident about five years ago. I was a budding data scientist myself and trying to get my hands around all this stuff. And we started this thing called the Boston Data Festival, which turned into this global event series now we call Open Data Science. So really happy to say we've done events in Ukraine. We've done events in Japan and Tokyo. That was a highlight. As I said, India here last year. And we do a lot of events in Boston, New York, and London. And we are spreading to Brazil for the first time. So what is ODSC? So there's two things we really emphasize. First and foremost, as you well know, it's building your skills. All of you here are on your data science journey, right? I'm not sure which part of your journey on you. Just beginning your data science journey. You may be what we call citizen data scientists. You may be career switchers. But you're very much here for building your skills. But I really want to emphasize in the next few minutes how important it is to build your network. Now on the tool side, I've been an engineer for the last three years myself. I always feel sorry for us data scientists, engineers. I don't understand. It's just relentless. I thought when I learned Java 20 years ago, I was it. I was done. I was Java architect. I was certified. Then along came R. I had to learn R. Then along came Python. Then I heard about this new thing called Julia. So it's never ending. And you see these polls is always reading things like TensorFlow came out of nowhere three years ago. Now you have PyTorch. Now you have Keras. And I do realize there's a lot of pressure on us, on this group, to pursue those skills. You see a lot of these polls. Employers want the latest and greatest tools. They also want the core skills. So this is a poll from Katie Nuggets, regression, decision trees, clustering, visualization, random forest. The skill list goes on. So when you're a data scientist or an AI engineer or a data engineer, whatever we're calling ourselves these days, it's a relentless pursuit of skills. And not to mention this open source data science ecosystem that ODSE is very passionate about. You know, I'm very assured, I don't know what's coming next, but I will tell you that this ecosystem will continue to grow and evolve. And thus, the demands on skills will keep evolving. And thus, the reason for ODSE, we're a skills conference, right? I always say that. We're not a data science conference. We're a skills conference. So wherever those skills come from. And this is a favorite quote of mine. And, you know, certain tools, I apologize in advance, but I think especially, you know, if you're in your 20s, you may believe that you're going to learn. Your next skill is the last one. You're going to learn it. That's it. I'm done. But what you'll find is, you know, think about AutoML that came out a couple of years ago. A lot of data sciences were getting worried that AutoML is going to replace your job. It's going to do everything well. Turns out that AutoML is just a productivity tool. It's just one more tool that you have to learn. So, you know, maybe some black box vendors will like you think that you're going to buy one thing, turn the keys, and that's it. And you're all done. But trust me, there is no Omnicombent tool out there. There's no master key. And really the master key is continuing to learn yourself. So ODSE is very much about skills. But let's talk a little bit about hard skills versus soft skills, right? So any of you guys' fans of these movies taken? You know, Liam Nielsen, yeah? I want to get a t-shirt like this made. Listen very carefully. I have data science skills, you know? I kind of think you guys are, it's very matchy. You're kind of like Liam Nielsen. Like, you know when you talk to somebody and they're especially outside of tech, right? What do you do? I'm a data scientist. They're like, ah, there's a slight pause. They're like, what does a data scientist do? So trust me, like, especially people outside of this world, they're very, they're in all of your skills. They're very inspired for that. So let's remember that, but we shouldn't put skills at the expense of everything else. What ODSE is very much about is about building your network. And I want to tell you why this is important. It's not about joining a golf club and improving your swing. When you play golf, I play golf at least once every two years. Pretty terrible, so we're not going to talk about that kind of networking. And the drink's kind of networking. I have a firm belief in this, and it kind of goes back to the founding ideas for ODSE. And that is, you know, data science is code plus math, right? Some kind of languages are a Python or something like that, or Julia. And you need some math skills, be it statistics, discrete math, stochastic calculus. Then you day, like, what makes you a data scientist? Lots of things, right? Every single one of you got a different answer to this. But data science is really those skills plus collaboration. And think about that. I'll just give a great example, University of Maryland, I think, as he was working with. But the most impactful AI, let's use that word interchangeably, AI and data science, comes from collaboration. And collaboration comes from networking, right? So think of the rise of the AI labs. Now, you know, when we started ODSE five years ago, there were very few AI labs out there. Now there are many, many more. And you actually have a few great ones here in India. I know IBM research is here, Microsoft research is here. You have the Indian Institute of Science and Machine Learning. They're a special interest group. You have OpenAI. Just got $1 billion last week, working a lot of stuff from SoftBank. And some of these are academic labs. And some are industry. But if you think about, just take a step back and we all use the research. I'm sure as data scientists, you're downloading the research continuously. I'm sure a lot of you are using some of the tools that come out of AI and other labs. But all of these labs are about collaboration. And if you want to advance your career, don't just think about continuous growth on the hard-skilled side. Think about the collaboration side. Because much of what is important is coming from this. Think of AI for good. You may think AI for good is something auxiliary to your career in data science. But trust me, I lived through the financial crisis when I was doing quant finance. People didn't understand quant finance. They didn't understand the bond markets. And that turned out very, very badly. You have the same thing with data science. You guys have some very, very powerful tools in your hand. You really need to understand what are the impacts of these. So you see in the last month alone, just in the last month, a couple of entities had to take down their facial recognition database. Because of privacy issues, the last couple of years, we've had to do a lot of work on making sure that AI is fair and unbiased. Because even the companies you work at now are working in the future, if you're not aware of what's going on in data science and AI from the medical standpoint, you could be putting your whole company at risk. So that's something that I think very carefully about. But a lot of the good, a lot of the AI for good institutes out there, they really come from collaboration. So my point is you have to think about collaborating to grow your career. Don't just think about being at the office, growing your skills and working your own project. You've got this fantastic skillset that can pretty much, it's up to you to whatever you want to do with it. But trust me, one of the keys to leveraging that skillset is collaboration. And I want to give you the best example, I have a collaboration, think of open source data science. Open source tool kits, whether it's on the language side, the something new deep learning frame was coming out. These were all the results of collaboration. So if you want to grow your career, if you want to increase your skills, I would encourage you and applaud you if you actually took part in some of these open source data science projects. They're very, very impactful and also excellent experience for you. So my trip to India here last year, I think back then we had about 10 meetups going around the world. But it really drove home to me the fact that networking collaboration is very key. So since India, we've actually grown our meetup, the number of meetups we have from something like, I think it was 12 and now we have 54 across the world. Again, we don't do these for our own benefits. We don't have any sponsors, we fund them ourselves. And anyone wants to sponsor a meetup, let me know. I know we spend a lot of money on pizza every month. And that was the result of coming here to India and made me understand that data science is global and collaboration is key. And if ODSC wants to be impactful, then we have to do just be more than a skills conference. We have to be kind of a collaboration network conference. I'll give you one last example of this. Brashal actually was studying MIT in Boston. He introduced me to Nuresh and Nuresh got in touch and this is how ODSC India came about. So a direct result of collaboration. Nuresh, I gotta say, man, you're a famous conference guys. Don't you have a better picture than the selfie you took at the beach five years ago? You know, you're gonna have to get one of the photographers inside of you as well. So, you know, you guys know what a neural net is, right? Think about neural nets. So, you know, just last parting thoughts. Sorry, this is very long-winded about what ODSC is, but you know, think about it. Build your network as you build your skills. You have a fantastic opportunity to connect with some very, very smart people here who are the speakers. You also have a fantastic opportunity to connect with your fellow attendees because I'm telling you, I know you may go to conferences or may not go to conferences. When I was an engineering, I never went to conferences. I went to skills training, that was it. But you will learn so much by talking to your fellow attendees. What are they working on? What are they doing? What are they passionate about? But don't forget, like, outside of this, connect with your community. Okay, this will, trust me, this will build your career. This will build your future. So, I want to leave it with that. Thank you very much. Right, thanks, Sheamus. Sorry, we didn't really introduce Sheamus, but I assume by now everyone knows he's the original founder of the ODSC conference and it's an honor to have him here with us. Are you guys having a good time so far? Worth coming in early? Not really. All right, I'm gonna just quickly take 10 to 15 minutes. I need to run you through some important updates that you need to know in terms of what's gonna happen over the next two days, some logistics so that you need to be aware of, and in case you need any kind of assistance or help, who do you reach out to, and so forth. Just for the guys who like to stand in the back, that's cool, but there are a lot of chairs here in the front if you want to come and grab. So please come in. So, as you may be aware, we kicked off the conference yesterday. We started with four pre-conference workshops. Fantastic, about 110 people spent the entire day kind of deep diving into a specific topic. We also did like a Kickstarter day yesterday, which was, I believe, well received about 60 people in the room, really kind of starting their understanding of what data science and AI is all for. And then today and tomorrow is the main conference. We're gonna be having four tracks. I'm gonna talk about that a little bit. And then tomorrow, on Saturday, we have, that's 10th August, we have post-conference workshops. Again, if you're looking for kind of deep dive into topics, then that's available. I know Shemu's talk quite a bit about networking. So one of the things we like to do at any of our events that you've been before is kind of kickstart the networking here right now so that you can kind of continue that. Just a quick show of hands, how many people have been to any event that we've organized before ODAC or other conferences that we run? Okay, so not a lot of people, which is good. So there's new people that you'll see how we run the conferences. Something I believe different in the way we run the conference and we kind of talk about that a little bit. But first I wanna do a little bit of a self-organizing activity. So what I would request everyone is to please stand up and then try and find people with these roles. So form groups of 10 people where you have these roles, these people wearing blue or other kinds of random things that we've put up. It was generated by an AI program, so. All right, please stand up. It's time to kind of get the energy back. If any group is done, you can start screaming, yelling, whatever just to grab my attention. Don't hang out with your own company people. Any group? We have a group over there? All right, awesome. So first group over there. Any other groups? Are you guys done? You have all the 10 roles? Kind of. Fantastic. Thank you everyone. Please take your seats. That was good. Did you see suddenly the energy in the room went up? So you bring really smart people together and kind of let them kind of self-organize. You see people really doing interesting things. So anyway, the reason why we kind of did this exercise is to just highlight the diversity of people in this room which is kind of really interesting. We have people here from 336 different companies which is quite fascinating in terms of the number of companies out here. And I'm quite happy to say that this year we have 874 people at the conference. Overall, we kind of went from 554. Seamus was like, next year we need to double. I'm like, no, no, no. Not double, but this is good enough. So you will see that there is people from very different companies out here and it'd be great for you to continue this networking through the next two days, right? How many people are with me in terms of continuing the networking, talking to other people, trying to see what they're gonna get out of interaction? Awesome. We have people from 15 countries here. So again, a quick exercise. If you can just stand up wherever you are. If you have traveled for less than 10 kilometer radius from the hotel, then please sit down. How about 25 kilometer radius, right? 50 kilometer radius. That should cover pretty much the whole Bangalore. So is this fair to say that you guys, the rest of you who are standing up are not from Bangalore? That's pretty awesome. So how about people from India if you can just sit down? I see some people who are standing up. All right, so thanks to these guys who've traveled from far to come here and be part of this conference. I appreciate that. I think Seymour's already talked about the speakers. So we have 84 speakers at this conference from seven countries. One of the things we kind of try to track is in terms of the gender diversity in the speakers. So we're kind of not very happy that we only have 17% women speakers, something we really wanna fix. So we appreciate everyone who's here. Maybe next year you can come in and submit a proposal and be part of the speaker panel. We would really appreciate that. That's again very important for us. So that's kind of the 84 speakers we have. Now one other thing that is important to understand is how this ODSE conference comes together. Not sure how many of you know what all happened before we got till this stage, right? So I wanna just give you a quick two minute walkthrough so that people understand how these conferences come together. So December last year, we announced the call for proposal. So this is an open call for proposal where we ask, hey, you know, we're gonna be holding ODSE conference in August. If you'd like to present at the conference, please submit a proposal. And in the spirit of being open, the submissions are open. It's not like you send an email somewhere. It's all online. Anyone can see what the submissions have come in. So as you can see, we got 208 proposals that came in. And then we had a program committee that kind of from different companies trying to work together to shortlist some of these proposals that came in. There's a round of feedback that happens before we shortlist the speakers. And then we zeroed in on 70 proposals out of the 208. So about one in three proposals that came in, one got selected, right? That's again, and it took, I don't know, six months, maybe over six months we kind of did that because all of us work as volunteers. This is not our daytime job. We all have daytime jobs. And then late nights, weekends, we try and work on trying to shortlist, provide the feedback and come to that. So when we look at it, we hope that out of the 208 proposals that came in, when we've shortlisted 70 down, we've really tried our best to kind of pick the best proposals that we think is good. Does not mean the rest of them were not good. It's more to say that what will form a coherent program for this conference. And we also try to kind of look at a good mix of different kinds of sessions. So they're not all talks. We have workshops. We have other kinds of experience reports. We have case studies. So we try and give a good mix of different kinds of sessions to kind of give a holistic perspective. So again, it's a long process that happens over a period of time, but we try and keep it open and transparent, and we encourage anybody to come in and help be part of the program committee. It's open for anybody to come and participate. So again, in spirit of being open and collaborative, we kind of keep it open as a platform. So that's a little bit of gist in terms of what happened till this stage, in terms of the selection process. So once I shut up, then we're gonna break for coffee and we're gonna split this hall into two hall and we're gonna split into four tracks after this. So we have four parallel tracks that are gonna be happening. I hope everyone's looked at the schedule. You know which stock you want to go to. We encourage people to kind of, mark on the schedule which session you're going. It helps us plan which halls people will be going to, depending on the demand for the sessions. But anyway, so right now we have four tracks. So this hall here, right here, is gonna be track number one, right? The first track. The dividers are gonna come in and the hall that side, where the rest of the folks are, that hall is gonna be track number two. So that's grand ball room two. This is grand ball room one. And then track number three, you go out of the hall and all the way to the end, you know there's a room called Jupiter. So that's the track number three over there. And track number four, as soon as you go out of this door straight next to the restrooms, there's a room called Neptune. So that's track number four, right? So everyone's clear with the four tracks that we have, right? Awesome. One of the things that we like to believe that we are different and we really want to encourage is the law of two feet. How many people are familiar with the law of two feet? People who attended our previous conference mostly. So the law of two feet is simple, that if you find yourself in a session where you're not adding value or getting value, what do you do? You look for the feedback form, but unfortunately, there are no feedback forms in your kits, right? So instead what you do is you use your two feet and you take yourself to another section where you will add value or get value. Actually, I was lying that we only have four tracks. We actually have five tracks. And the fifth track is right outside here, which is what we call is the hallway track, right? Which is a free flowing track and that's usually where you will find the best discussions or learning happening in my opinion. So there are five tracks, four in the halls and one outside in the hallway, right? I'm hoping everyone's got the app. The app allows you to rate the sessions. The app allows you to look at the schedule, gives you reminder, a bunch of things. You can look at who else is attending the session. You can contact other attendees through this. So if you've not got the app, there are small posters right outside each door, which allows you to get the app. Get the app, rate the sessions. That really helps us understand how each session was received and that feedback can then be incorporated in the next year's planning so that we can see which sessions were well received, what topics were popular. So once you get the app, you can market, but you can also go on to this each session. So as and when the time comes, it'll basically show you an icon where you can rate the session. It'll show you a little star. If you don't want to download the app, you don't want to install the app, that's fine. There is a web version for this. So you can do the same thing on the web. It works on the mobile as well. So you go to skdsked.link slash odsc and you should be able to see the web view of this. Again, in the web view, you would be able to rate the session. So when you click on the star, you would be able to rate any given session, provide some feedback if you like. Again, I want to just reiterate that this is extremely important for us. So please, please do rate the sessions that you're attending. Good, bad, ugly, whatever. Give your honest feedback. It helps us improve based on your feedback, all right? Clear so far? Sheamus already thanked the sponsors. The one thing that we really want to highlight is it's not just the financial support these guys provide. They actually help us with a lot of networking, a lot of connections, helping promote the conference. It's a really true community kind of a thing. If you see our conferences don't actually offer a lot to the sponsors. And I'll say this here, right? Like one of the things that a lot of sponsors come to us is like I'm sponsoring, so I need a keynote. And you probably would have seen that a lot of conferences that does happen, right? There's a keynote because there's somebody sponsoring the conference. Both the keynotes that we have this year and even last year that we had, none of them were sponsors. None of them are sponsored talks. Because we believe that people are paying money and coming here because they want to hear true insights from practitioners, from leaders like, you know, Vidal who's kind of leading some of these things. Or tomorrow we'll have Grant Sanderson, you know, who's been doing a lot of interesting work. So people want to listen from practitioners, want to listen from thought leaders. And so we try and, you know, not mix, as I say, the church and the state, right? We don't mix the two things. So we don't offer a lot to the sponsors, so please do make sure you stop by and thank them for still supporting the conference in spite of not really getting a lot out of this. This is more of them just, you know, being, you know, thankful to being part of the community. So, you know, please do stop by and thank them for being, they're just outside here. I hope everyone reads email, but I know most people don't. So I do put the Wi-Fi password here in case you've not got the Wi-Fi password. That's the Wi-Fi password for you. ODSE is the network and then the SSID and hash ODSE India is the password. Can I have the volunteers quickly stand up just so that we know if things are not working well, who to kind of go grab hold of? So that's the group of volunteers. I believe you have a white cap with you. So, you know, that's a way to recognize the volunteers. So these guys will be in different rooms. If you need any help, please, you know, reach out to them. So again, thank you guys for volunteering and helping us run this event smoothly, right? The program committee, do we have everyone in the program committee here? I know Dennis is not here. Unfortunately, she couldn't make it, who's the conference program chair. But can I have the rest of the program committee please quickly stand up? I think there's a good overlap here between the folks. So, yep, couple of folks. So if you're not happy with the program, you know who to grab hold of. All right, with that, I will shut up and I will let you enjoy the conference, this coffee tea that's gonna be served right now outside the halls. So I request everyone to please wicket the halls. We're gonna be dividing these halls and then we will start again at 11 o'clock. All right, thank you.