Chicago Data Nights bring together academics and industry professionals in downtown Chicago

Bridging the gap between academic research and industry applications has never been more important. But it can be difficult to bring these two worlds together. That’s where the Chicago Data Night series comes in.

Formed as a monthly event, co hosted by ChiData and DSI, the Chicago Data Night brings together data science practitioners, academics, and aficionados in the Chicago community. The organizers of Chicago Data Night invite everyone to be part of an interdisciplinary community at the intersection of industry and academia, brought together by a mutual interest in data.

“Working on research problems on data management and data science is great not only because of the intellectual questions we seek to answer but also because of the potential for real-world impact of the results,” says ChiData lead and organizer Raul Castro Fernandez. “Making sure the work remains relevant and impactful is to keep a close connection with the industry.”

Chicago Data Night provides a venue for both socializing across fields and a chance to hear from the industry perspective. Each month, guest speakers cover a specific data-related topic. In the first session this October, the featured speakers covered Large Language Models and their role in data management.

Kader Sakkaria, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL), opened the first Data Night with a discussion on use of data in RNL’s digital transformation and how that shapes the way they engage and serve their clients in higher education industry by modernizing to cloud and on-premise technical capabilities and solutions.

Dr. Helen Sun, an AI and machine learning engineering leader at Meta, was the closing speaker. She discussed LLMs, generative AI and Llama 2 from Meta AI.

When asked about the importance of breaking down barriers between data scientists in academia and industry, Fernandez responded, “Events like the Chicago Data Night are a win-win for researchers and practitioners, as we learn from each other over technical talks, food, and drinks.”

The Chicago Data Night talk series is hosted monthly at the 1871 in the Merchandise Mart. The last 2023 speaker will be Ari Kaplan, speaking about the modern data stack and his experience founding Databricks.

Hear first-hand about the modern data stack. Businesses are adopting lakehouse architectures and building GenAI LLMs for their businesses. Having helped lead the adoption of data science throughout baseball, including creating the Chicago Cubs analytics department, Ari will lead a lively discussion on the most up-to-date business trends for building data & AI at scale and velocity, and how businesses are now training their own proprietary LLMs on their own data with transparency, governance, and explainability.

Register to attend Kaplan’s talk here, and keep your eyes peeled for the January offering of Chicago Data Nights.