Microsoft Ignite (Virtual) Conference Online (and free) November 2-4

Microsoft is hosting a technology conference online called Microsoft Ignite on November 2-4 and the registration is free.

You can learn more and register at the following URL: https://myignite.microsoft.com/home

Since it is a Microsoft conference, the speakers and presentations are focused on Microsoft, but if you are trying to learn some of their tools, they have a “learning zone” and training on some of their products.

Since it’s free, you may as well check it out!

Tableau Conference ’21 (Nov. 9 – 12) – Registration Open (virtual and free)

The registration for Tableau Conference 21 is now open, virtual, and completely free!  You can register at: https://www.tableau.com/events/conference

The conference is online in November from Tuesday, 9th – Friday, 12th 9am-3pm SJSU time (a.k.a. Pacific time).  In case you are at your chateau in France that week, they also have broadcast times slightly delayed for Europe and Asia Pacific.

There are a number of speakers and discussions (keynote speakers were not announced yet, other than their CEO), but if you sign up early, you can reserve a spot to talk with one of their “Tableau Doctors” to help diagnose visualization problems vexing you or a project you are working on.  Also, if there is a talk that interests you, you can also join a live Q&A session with the speakers and ask questions.

Free Data Conference Later in September

You may have already seen this in Data Science Central, but a company named Fivetran out of Oakland is sponsoring a free online conference.  They had some interesting speakers and topics, but I had not heard of them before (so I Googled).  They provide a service to do the ETL (extract, transform, load) to bring external data into a client’s data warehouse.  If you are interested in checking out the conference topics or registering, go here: https://www.moderndatastackconference.com

 

If you are interested in the intersection of programming, data, and graphic arts

When searching for an article I had saved in Pocket, I stumbled across an article I had saved about the winning entry in the recent Data Visualization Society Census Challenge.  If you had not heard of data visualization challenges, Tableau has an annual Iron Viz challenge where people compete to create data visualizations.  The article is interesting and worth a read, but it also mentions the Data Visualization Society, which you can join for free, and their website has links to resources in this space plus other data challenges.  There is also a link to their recent inaugural Outlier conference on data visualization which was online due to the pandemic.

The data visualization community combines people from a variety of backgrounds trying to make informative data visualizations that capture your attention.  They are people interested in communicating with data who combine programming skills (mainly JavaScript and related platforms) with graphic arts abilities. If you are a hardcore programmer, you may think they are too artsy, and if you are purely a graphic artist, they may seem nerdy, but if you are interested in the intersection of both, these may be your people, so check them out.

Resources page added to the Data Science for All website

Since our students and seminar participants ask us from time-to-time where they can find more information or resources for learning data science, software (preferably free), and data sets, we added a Resources page to the Data Science for All website.  We plan to add to that list on a regular basis, so please check back from time-to-time.  If you know of a resource or dataset that you find intriguing, please send us an email and we will add it to the list.  If you graduated and are working in a data science or data-related position (congratulations!), and there is a tool you have found helpful (and it has a student budget version), please let us know so we can pass the information along.