Aaron Williams
Oct 11, 2019

Come Join Us at Converge Community Day

Try HeavyIQ Conversational Analytics on 400 million tweets

Download HEAVY.AI Free, a full-featured version available for use at no cost.

GET FREE LICENSE

Converge is almost here, and I couldn’t be more excited. We’re hosting our inaugural Community Day at Converge on Monday, October 21st. This half-day is a gathering of OmniSci technical experts, top contributors and learners who reside in the fast-growing field of accelerated analytics and data science. This inclusive and informational series of events will include lightning talks, immersive hands on workshops and a speaker panel all available for no additional cost. We’ve also decided to pepper in a series of data challenges to test your analytics and data science skills throughout the conference. In this post, I’ll take you through a quick rundown of what we have planned for the day, and hopefully get you excited enough to come join us!

To kick off the afternoon, we have a keynote on the future of data that will help set the tone for the event, followed by several lightning talks to get you thinking, covering commercial and research projects in analytics and data science. What are the current challenges industries face with their data? How has using OmniSci amplified their work and streamlined their analytics?

We have an excellent diverse collection of speakers from our community.

As part of our kick off, a series of Converge Data Challenges will be launched. Over the course of the 2.5 days of Converge, attendees will have the chance to flex their analytics and data science skills by finding insights in a dataset from our partner Tutela, who is the leading provider of crowd-sourced mobile phone data. All participants will get a free OmniSci Cloud instance, with the relevant data pre-loaded, along with all the help they need from our technical experts to complete the challenges. You’re welcome to work in teams or individually, and are encouraged to share your findings and beautiful dashboards with the rest of the community. We’re looking for the best data hackers! Share your project as a GIF or as a screenshot on Twitter and use the hashtag #OmniSciChallenge.

All data challenge participants will be able to pick up and receive a pin above.

After the talks, we’ll break out into two hands-on workshops:

  • OmniSci 101: Accelerating the Data Science Workflow
  • Creating Custom Visualizations and Applications Using OmniSci

The first will cover getting started with OmniSci and building a data science workflow with our platform, and the other will cover using OmniSci’s APIs to build a custom application.

Bring your laptop to these sessions, because you’ll want to follow along with what the instructors are doing. This is also a great time to ask questions, we’ll have some of our smartest engineers and developer advocates leading the workshops, so no question is off limits. We’ll be using the Tutela data in these workshops as well, so if you want to get a jump start on the challenges, this is a great place to get started.

After the workshops, we’ll have a speaker panel built of savvy experts from across OmniSci including engineering, product, and marketing. This will be your chance to get a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re building the platform, and how we are engaging our users and contributors. To button up the day, there will be a reception at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara Hotel, which will be a great time to meet the relevant people and put a face to the name in the OmniSci community.

Hopefully this has helped convince you to join us on October 21 for Community Day at Converge. Community Day tickets are free and available to everyone, and you can sign up at our event registration page. It’s followed by two more conference days of great content, with in-depth talks from our business partners, customers and users. I encourage you to look at the full agenda and speaker lineup.

We do have a small number of free passes to the full Converge event that we’re giving away to community members; reach out to our team directly to community@omnisci.com for more information.


Aaron Williams

Aaron is responsible for HEAVY.AI's developer, user and open source communities. He comes to OmniSci with more than two decades of previous success building ecosystems around some of software’s most familiar platforms. Most recently he ran the global community for Mesosphere, including leading the launch and growth of DC/OS as an open source project. Prior to that he led the Java Community Process at Sun Microsystems, and ecosystem programs at SAP. Aaron has also served as the founding CEO of two startups in the entertainment space. Aaron has an MS in Computer Science and BS in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University.