Looking forward to Data Science Week 2020, Virtual Edition!

As has been true for many events in 2020, our third annual LinkedIn Data Science Week will be a little different this year than it has been in the past. All of our events will be happening online, and while I’ll miss the chance to see many of my colleagues in person, I’m thankful that we have the opportunity to virtually come together as a global Data Science team from September 21-25. The week’s festivities will include workshops, conference talks, networking events, and a fireside chat with Mohak Shroff, our Senior Vice President of Engineering. We’re also excited to have a special guest, Dr. Xiao-Li Meng, Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Data Science Review, to give our keynote speech this year: “Sleepless Data Scientists: COVID-19, 2020 Election, and Differential Privacy for 2020 Census.” 

While this year has had its challenges, our data scientists have risen to the occasion many times. In addition to the technical talks and networking opportunities, I’m looking forward to celebrating many of the team’s achievements this week. For example, earlier this year we shared details about our revamped experimentation engine. This was a massive undertaking, including rewriting the engine in a completely different language, Java, but the results were impressive: 20x faster sequential evaluation and 14.7x faster concurrent evaluation, among other improvements. Then, in the spring, we unveiled and open sourced a new Apache Spark library that can be used for inequality A/B testing. By allowing us to evaluate if a new feature benefits different groups of members equally, regardless of how large their networks are, this library is helping us build a more equitable platform that can truly help bring economic opportunity to everyone. 

I’m excited to see the ideas and connections this week will bring as we take the time to come together as a team to learn, grow, and celebrate 13 years of data science at LinkedIn! While the event is only for LinkedIn employees, we will be making a recording of Dr. Meng’s keynote address available publicly—look for future updates here on LInkedIn or follow our LinkedIn Engineering blog for updates.