Data Conferences Worth Adding to Your Calendar

Shopify's data scientists and engineers spend a lot of time learning from the wider data community, and conferences are one of their preferred formats for that. The events below span hybrid, virtual, and in-person formats, with a mix of research-heavy tracks, industry-focused talks, and hands-on training. Here's what they recommend for 2022.

Hybrid Events

Data + AI Summit 2022

When: June 27-30
Where: Virtual or San Francisco

This four-day global event brings in top data industry experts for keynotes, technical sessions, and hands-on training. Coverage spans business intelligence, data analytics, machine learning, and work with tools like Presto, Looker, and Kedro. There's solid material on applying open source technology such as Spark to practical problems involving large data volumes.

Ehsan K. Asl, Senior Data Engineer

Transform 2022

When: July 19-28
Where: Virtual or San Francisco

Transform packs three events into two weeks. The Data & AI Executive Summit takes a leadership view of real-world AI and data successes, while Data Week and The AI & Edge Week dig into relevant topics across retail, finance, and healthcare industry tracks. The conference's strength is showing how different industries apply AI, which can spark fresh approaches to challenges in your own sector.

Ella Hilal, VP of Data Science

RecSys 2022

When: September 18-23
Where: Virtual or Seattle

RecSys is devoted entirely to recommender systems: new developments, techniques, and use cases. Both a research track and an industry track give attendees different perspectives, with the industry track covering real-world recommender challenges from leading companies. Expect sessions on recommender applications in fashion, ecommerce, and media, plus reinforcement learning, evaluation metrics, and bias and fairness.

Chen Karako, Data Scientist Lead

ODSC West

When: November 1-3
Where: Virtual or San Francisco

ODSC West is a chance to connect with the broader data science community and contribute to the open source ecosystem. Keynotes span machine learning, MLOps, natural language processing, big data analytics, and emerging research areas. Alongside the technical talks, there's a pre-conference bootcamp covering programming, math, or statistics, a career expo, and chances to talk with industry experts.

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 engineers building and using open source data tools, with events worldwide. PyData London is one of its larger gatherings. The first day runs tutorials on topics like data validation and training object detection with small datasets; the following two days feature talks on practical subjects such as solving business problems with Bayesian modeling. Shopify will be at this year's event.

Micayla Wood, Data Brand & Comms Senior Manager

KDD 2022

When: August 14-18
Where: Washington D.C.

KDD skews research-heavy and has been home to major data industry innovations like personalized advertising and recommender systems. Keynote speakers come from academia, industry, and policy, with well-written papers accompanying each talk. It's a good conference for staying current on industry trends.

Vincent Chio, Data Science Manager

Re-Work Deep Learning Summit

When: November 9-10
Where: Toronto

This summit showcases what's new in AI research and how businesses apply those advances in practice. Content covers computer vision, pattern recognition, generative models, and neural networks, with speakers addressing both wins and remaining challenges in AI deployment. Even for non-ML engineers, the material remains accessible, including talks on setting up practical ETL pipelines for machine learning.

Ehsan K. Asl, Senior Data Engineer

Crunch

When: October 3-5
Where: Budapest

Crunch focuses on data science use cases for scaling a business. Talks and workshops cover current data science trends and tools, building effective data teams, and machine learning at scale. It's also a good place to meet data scientists across Europe. Partner conferences Impact and Amuse run alongside it for relevant product and UX talks.

Yizhar (Izzy) Toren, Senior Data Scientist