Data Festival to Take Place in Tbilisi
Athree-day event focusing on data and communication will be held on 7-9 November in Tbilisi. It is the first festival of this scale to be held in the Caucasus, set to attract leading industry experts from around the world.
Data plays a huge role in many aspects of society and business, affecting everything from consumer purchasing decisions to advertising campaigns; web design to fake news. The event will be very relevant to those working in Georgia’s technology and communication sectors.
Bringing together over 500 journalists, CSO activists, marketing specialists, business professionals, government officials, data analysts, developers and designers working with data, the event will explore the potential impact and uses of data. The festival focuses on six main uses of data: in journalism and truth, politics, science and artificial intelligence, fintech, visualization, and marketing.
The event is organized by Forset, a team of creatives specializing in data communications, and Data Science Tbilisi, a collective of data scientists. The first day will be held at Tbilisi State University, with the following days to take place at Mediatheka Veterans Park. Numerous global companies have supported the event, including Prague Civil Society Center, Eastern Partnership Civil Society, Zalando, Exactpro, and Fintech. It will be attended by employees and industry experts from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Zalando, Deutsche Welle, as well as professors from universities, among others.
On the first day, DataFest will offer the opportunity to hear a series of 20-minute inspirational talks from industry experts on topics such as ‘How Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we look at data’ by Daniel Rsaza, a teaching fellow at Google News Lab, ‘Amazon: Years of AI innovation on behalf of customers’ by Denis Batalov, a machine learning architect at Amazon Web Services, and ‘Exploring the structure of human smuggling networks’ by Isabella Gollini, Assistant Professor at the University College Dublin.
The following day, participants will be able to choose from various workshops led by data experts to delve deeper into data topics. The full-on day of data immersion begins at 9:30 and will prepare participants for the datathons on the final day. The datathons will cover topics such as machine learning, civil society and data, and data for storytellers. Most talks will be held in English or Russian.
Tickets can be purchased on the datafest.ge website until November 7 and are priced at 150 GEL (1st day), 200 GEL (1st and 2nd day), and 250 GEL (all three days).
By Amy Jones