2015 has already been a great year for the data enthusiasts as we have had several events focused on data and analytics. The good news is if you are interested in attending data or analytics conferences, there is a lot more to come. In this post, I would like to cover some major events focused on data and analytics planned for the second half of this year. [Disclosure: I will be speaking at some of these events so would like to disclose that upfront.]. I have also included the cheapest price options, and early bird discounted price where ever applicable so continue reading.

Sentiment Analysis Symposium

Location: New York, NY

Date: July 15-16, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,695 (early bird price until July 11, 2015)

If Big data is a buzz word, then sentiment analysis is a bigger buzzword for data science enthusiasts. There is no shortage of social data, and this is what text analysts thrive on. Twitter, Facebook, Reditt, LinkedIn and other social media sources are becoming a major playground for mining text data.

Sentiment Analysis Symposium is a great place to quench your text analytics and sentiment analytics thirst. You can hear from some of the top brands on how they are using text, speech and other unstructured data sources to drive business outcomes.

Some of the sessions I personally would like to attend are:

• Analyzing an image in social media by Francesoco D’Orazio, Face, Pulsar
• The predictive nature of social data by Rob Key, Conversion and Joel Rubinson, Rubinson Partners
• How to Detect Pervasive Issues Early and Develop Future Products Through VOC Analytics by Mohammed Chaara and Guangxue Xiao, Lenovo

Data Science Summit & Dato Conference 2015

Location: San Francisco, CA

Date: July 20-21, 2015

Ticket Cost: $600 (for both events)

Dato has partnered with Intel to deliver a combined data science and Dato conference. There are some big brand names associated with this event, including IBM, Microsoft Comcast, and O’Reilly Media. I quickly glanced at the agenda, and it looks packed with data science cases studies, university research, data visualization and analytics sessions.

The target audience for the summit is researchers and data scientists from academia as well as industry to discuss state of the art data science, applied machine learning and predictive applications.

TDWI Boston 2015

Location: Boston, MA

Date: July 26-31, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,700 (price for Tuesday & Wednesday)

The event organizers claim this to be the “Biggest event on the analytics this year!”. I am not sure how accurate is this claim as apparently the data conference is missing data to support this claim. However, I like the format of this conference as it offers sessions focused on real-world experiences and are presented by teachers—not just speakers.

If you are keen on receiving handons data science and analytics training, then the agenda looks perfect to me. It includes more than 65 full-, half-, and quarter-day courses, from business intelligence basics to big data analytics, data visualization, the evolving data ecosystem, and much more.

Advancing Analytics & ADMA Global Forum 2015

Location: Sydney, Australia

Date: August 4-5, 2015

Ticket Cost: $2,930 (early bird non member price before July 12, 2015 for each event)

ADMA Australia has combined analytics, marketing, design and advertising into one 3-day event in Sydney. From the list of four parallel events, the two that are focused on data are the ADMA Global Forum and the Advancing Analytics.

The Global Forum has a 2-day agenda focused on data-driven marketing and advertising with case studies on content marketing, social media, customer acquisition, retention and digital trends. You can hear from some global brand names such as Vodaphone, Bosch, American Express and L’Oreal. The event includes seven keynotes and many smaller sessions on social media, digital marketing and analytics.

Advanced Analytics, on the other hand, is a single-day event with six keynotes and several smaller sessions. Some of the presenting brands are Barclays, CERN and GILT. AA agenda is filled with data mining, sentiment analysis, data strategy and predictive analytics.

KDD 2015

Location: Sydney, Australia

Date: August 10-13, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,155 (full non member pricing)

KDD is a popular for its data science contests similar to Kaggle. Their 2015 conference is focused on machine learning, data modeling, artificial intelligence and controlled experiments. The full list of speakers includes Adobe, LinkedIn, Visa, and Rocket Fuel along with speakers who run high-impact applications.

Big Data by the Bay

Location: San Francisco, CA

Date: August, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1950.00 (conference only pricing)

This is another multi conference event for data engineers, scientists, developers and managers. The first event is Scala by the bay (August 13-16) designed for developers who use Scala language. The event is followed by Big Data by the bay (August 16-18) and finally Text by the bay (August 24-25). I personally think the theme of the conference is big data, and it would be advisable to the conference hosts to merge all three conferences into one big event with different tracks for business users, developers and practitioners. It definitely will reduce any confusion.

There is also a full training day focused on Scala pipeline training and integrations. Some of the key speakers are from Cloudera, Stumbleupon, and Databricks.

Global Big Data Conference

Location: Santa Clara, CA

Date: September 1-3, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,499.00 (3-Day pass)

The 3rd annual GBD conference is scheduled in Santa Clara with a packed agenda on big data use cases, Apache Hadoop, Spark, data science, security and training. The conference boasts 500+ attendees, 75+ speakers, 50+ sessions on data mining, big data, social analytics and data commerce. You can hear from key data-driven organizations such as LinkedIn, Ebay, Nordstorm, Haliburton and Western Digital.

Some of the key value propositions of this conference are:

• Experts in the Big Data from the US with hands-on experience provide the training.
• 3 days of intense training (8 hrs/day) with multiple-use cases to practice (equivalent to one full month’s training from other sources).
• A Big Data Certification will be provided upon completion of the training.

Big Data Innovation Summit

Location: Boston, MA

Date: September 9-10, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,295 (Full access Silver pass – cheapest option) (25% discount for my blog readers discount if you register using this link: https://goo.gl/OUuyYm)

The Big Data Innovation Summit claims to have 800+ attendees and 80 speakers from the largest gathering of Fortune 500 business executives leading big data initiatives. Big Data Innovation Summit is developed and orchestrated by Innovation Enterprise, a popular analytics and digital organization. BDIS has a five-point track structure with emphasis on:

• Big Data & Analytics
• Data Science
• Apache
• Cloud & Data Architecture
• Analytics & Infrastructure

Some of the presenting brands include GE, United Nations, Citi, Airbnb, IBM and UPS.

Predictive Analytics World Business

Location: Boston, MA

Date: September 27-October 1, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,700 (Full access pass – cheapest option)

Predictive Analytics World (PAW) hosts several data and analytics conferences each year. The one in Boston later this year is focused on business users and teaches how to apply data science to improve business outcome. PAW business runs in parallel with PAW healthcare and the agenda is packed with training and sessions on R programming, ensemble methods, price optimization, customer retention and campaign measurement.

IBM Insight 2015

Location: Las Vegas, NV

Date: Oct 25-29, 2015

Ticket Cost: $1,595 (Super save rate – register before August 3, 2015)

IBM Insight is arguably one of the largest data and analytics conference on the planet. Last year’s event was attended by tens of thousands of data and analytics followers with packed sessions and training. I called it as one of the largest because of the record attendance, 1,600+ planned sessions and 1,000+ presenters. The conference agenda covers broad topics such as analytics, cloud, commerce, mobile and security.