Draft:Data Makers Fest

Data Makers Fest is a data science conference for individuals and organizations from various sectors of the data ecosystem to discuss its applications, current trends, and its impact on decision-making. The first edition of Data Makers Fest took place in October 2023, at the Porto Convention Centre, in Porto, Portugal, attracting 700 attendees. The event featured speakers and participants from notable companies and organizations from Portugal and abroad, such as Intel, Meta, Nvidia, the United Nations, Wix and IKEA. Speakers discussed the current and future data science applications, ranging from banking to football or terrorism prevention.

Second Edition: 2024
Building on the success of its inaugural edition, Data Makers Fest has announced its second edition, scheduled to take place on September 24th and 25th, 2024. The event will once again be held at Alfândega do Porto, also known as Porto Convention Centre.

Notable Speakers
The inaugural edition of Data Makers Fest featured distinguished speakers such as:
 * Lambert Hogenhout (Chief Data, Analytics, and Emerging Technologies at United Nations), brought awareness to the fact that data scientists have an unproportional impact on the world as their work, even if often invisible to society, is highly impactful, they can impact wars and shape nations.
 * Wei Li (VP and Manager of AI and Analytics at Intel), talked about how AI was a great opportunity for Intel, both in hardware and software. He presented two case studies, the first about partnering with  Meta Platforms for the creation of their Large language model,  LLaMA2 and the creation of the supercomputer Aurora Gen AI.
 * Carlos Muñoz (Co-founder of Alinia, a Startup working on LLM safety, AI Governance & Regulation) and Kai Zenner (Head of Office and Digital Policy Adviser in the European Parliament),  discussed The EU Artificial Intelligence Act. This act aims to regulate how AI is used in the EU depending on the potential risk. In a crossroads of politics and technology, they gave information on the AI act, and its impact on practitioners and on the fast paced environment of EU digitalization.

Conference Content
Data Makers Fest covers a wide range of topics relevant to the data science field, such as:
 * Advanced Analytics
 * Data Career Skills
 * Data-Centric
 * Data Engineering & MLOps
 * Data Product Management
 * Data Team Leadership
 * Data Visualisation
 * Deep Learning
 * Domain-specific applications of AI
 * Explainability
 * Forecasting
 * Generative AI
 * Information Retrieval
 * NLP
 * Recommendation and Personalization
 * Responsible AI