MLOps Community and MLOps World — better together
Super-excited to announce that we’re joining forces with our sister organization across the pond, MLOps World. Together we’re going to co-promote the upcoming MLOps World Conference and bring our own MLOps Community ideas and content to an even bigger global audience of data scientists and ML pros.
For those who don’t know, MLOps World is a leading community of machine learning professionals based in Canada. Since 2017 they’ve been running an impressive North American local events program plus their annual big blast conference, which is happening this year on June 14th and 17th.
I’ve spoken at their events in the past. I have also been able to get some great guests for our meetups from the speakers that attend the conference. As the global MLOps community starts to coalesce; we thought we could light a fire under the process by forging closer links between our respective communities.
MLOps Community is all about collaboration. It is our goal to have a fun place for people to learn about MLOps beyond the surface-level blog posts. We pride ourselves on the experts that form part of our community. Amongst the members of this community, we are all generous with our knowledge, and look forward to interacting with each other.
Over the past year or so, I’ve repeatedly crossed paths with MLOPs World founder Dave Scharbach at events and forums. When that happens 2 or 3 times its starts to feel like fate! After some discussion, we thought, why not try and bring the two memberships closer together?
And now here we are. I should say this is an alliance, not a merger. And maybe I am making a big deal out of nothing. I however feel that the MLOps World conferences are such high quality that I wanted to throw the weight of the community behind it.
We’re going to co-promote and boost mutual participation in one another’s events and online platforms. We hope to see lots more people from the MLOps World community posting in our Slack and subscribing to the YouTube channel. And we’ll be actively promoting the MLOps World event agenda too.
Altogether it should mean more sharing of best practices, success stories, and advice on solving thorny practical problems in taking ML models to production.
One example of that co-operation already coming to life is the competition we’re sponsoring in advance of the June conference. We have eight teams in the Engineering Labs group working on the best way to demonstrate the value of a feature store.
They can choose an open-source solution or create their own and then measure before and after on a few different metrics. You can think of it as building a kaggle for MLOps. The winner of that competition will secure a place to present their findings at the conference.
As Dave put it when we spoke earlier this week: ‘We don’t want it to be an echo chamber. The more exposure we all have to different approaches and different ideas, the better.
‘We have a great opportunity because the circumstances of the last year mean that people are more open to connecting with colleagues globally than they’ve ever been in the past.’
MLOPs Word Conference 2021
This year’s event will feature talks from the likes of Matei Zaharia of Databricks and Brian Amadio of Stitch Fix, along with a wide array of workshops, project presentations, and practical advice sessions. Altogether we’re expecting 1,000 attendees, 60 speakers, and 20+ workshops.
When anyone signs up for the event, they’ll be directed to join the new conference channel on the MLOPs Community Slack #MLOps-World.
We are hoping that the pre and post party happens in the MLOps community Slack and the day of banter is at the virtual conference. Come join us!
