What to expect at the JupyterCon 2018 Business Summit

We’ve seen a dramatic shift in Jupyter’s deployment over the past two years: starting with mostly use by individuals, but moving to enterprise production deployments at scale. Even while enterprise use cases for Jupyter tend to share common themes, however, there hasn’t been a forum for comparing approaches. So, we’re excited to be expanding the enterprise-related content at the Business Summit at JupyterCon 2018 in New York City in August. The track will open with Enterprise usage of Jupyter: The business case and best practices for leveraging open source, by Project Jupyter co-lead Brian Granger. His talk will include training aspects, which get applied later in the summit during the discussion groups:

• the business case for adopting open source in large organizations
• how Jupyter is evolving to address enterprise usage cases
• developing infrastructure tooling based on open standards
• how open source projects work from a governance perspective
• best practices for enterprise to engage with open source (what to do, what not to do)
• engaging with Jupyter through strategic initiatives: Jupyter white papers, roadmap planning, etc.

That follows with speakers throughout the two-day track presenting enterprise use cases (in most cases, initial-year results) from Capital One, DoD, Amazon AWS, Booz Allen Hamilton, GE, Teradata, PayPal, Two Sigma, Capsule8. Enterprise organizations are leveraging Jupyter to build out their collaborative data infrastructures internally. While those use cases leverage open source tooling, such as JupyterHub, once the software gets deployed, the organizational challenges immediately rise to the fore. These represent pain points that enterprise organizations share: collaboration, discovery, needs for reproducible work, security, data privacy, compliance, ethics, and data access patterns—all of which aren’t one size fits all.

We’ve encountered several large use cases within DoD and finance, for example, so one of our goals for the Business Summit at JupyterCon 2018 is to bring those use cases and practices into one place. Many opportunities exist for collaboration, sharing best practices, and supporting crossover between government and industry. Themes being explored through enterprise case studies—presented by the practitioners—include:

• Collaboration and sharing data insights in highly regulated environments (David Schaaf, Shivraj Ramanan, Capital One)
• Jupyter use vis-a-vis sensitive data and public policy (Julia Lane, NYU)
• Citizen data science within the U.S. intelligence community, particularly for discoverability of notebooks across large teams, with fine-grained controls for data sensitivity (Dave Stuart, DoD)
• Why commit capital to open source? (Matt Greenwood, Two Sigma)
• Notebooks as a transparent way to document machine learning model development for government agencies (Catherine Ordun, Booz Allen Hamilton)
• When to use Excel versus Jupyter to improve corporate reporting and tax process (Ed Ma, GE)
• Jupyter in the modern enterprise data and analytics ecosystem (Gerald Rousselle, Teradata)
• JupyterHub plus custom extensions for cybersecurity: rapid deployment of ML models for threat detection (George Williams, Harini Kannan, and Alex Comerford, Capsule8)
• Machine learning model interpretation, compliance, GDPR, and ethics (Pramit Choudhary, Oracle, et al.)
• Data science and machine learning at scale, powered by Jupyter for simplified UX, improved time-to-market for analysts, security compliance, etc. (Romit Mehta and Praveen Kanamarlapudi, PayPal)

We had many more excellent session proposals than could be included in the program; these will be presented as “poster sessions” in the concourse for the Business Summit to facilitate discussion during breaks.

The first day’s track will conclude with a roundtable discussion: The Current Environment: Compliance, ethics, ML model interpretation, GDPR, etc., with participation from IBM, Capital One, DoD, Amazon AWS, and Oracle. This roundtable is intended to summarize common themes across the different use cases being presented, plus provide time for extended Q&A. The audience will have opportunities to submit questions in advance to the moderator. Note that the Q&A is intended as dialog among practitioners: we ask that members of the press hold their questions for other opportunities outside of the Business Summit.

At the end of the second day, the summit concludes with unconference-style break-out sessions, intended as a “two-way street” for enterprise stakeholders to give input to Project Jupyter directly about features needed, roadmap priorities, and who will partner on specific projects.

Participants who attend the Business Summit will receive a certificate of participation for “Enterprise Engagement in Open Source.” Note that we are exploring options for providing CEUs (continuing education credits) for Business Summit participation—to align more closely with government agency accounting requirements.

Diversity, fundraising, and registration discounts

We believe that true innovation depends on hearing from, and listening to, people with a variety of perspectives. Please read our Diversity Statement and learn more about our Diversity & Inclusion scholarship program. We had several recipients in 2017, and are looking to nearly double that number in 2018.

While JupyterCon registration is open, we’re raising funds for PyLadies, an international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open source community. We ask that you consider joining us in supporting this worthy organization by making a modest donation when you sign up. O’Reilly will match those donations at the end of the conference. We wouldn’t usually make a financial contribution selected by default, but we hope this underscores how crucial we think it is to support diversity. Also, we welcome your thoughts about this or other successful diversity efforts you’ve encountered. Send suggestions, comments, and feedback to diversity@oreilly.com.

Along with the diversity scholarships, there are several other categories for discount rate eligibility in JupyterCon registrations:

• Government/Academic/Nonprofit: You are eligible for this rate if you are a full-time employee of the government, an academic institution, or a 501(c)(3). Please register with your .gov, .edu, or .org email address.
• Students: For the student rate, please provide proof of full-time student status and register with your .edu email address if possible. If you are a college-level student based in the U.S. and need financial support to attend JupyterCon 2018, aid is available from Project Jupyter. Please apply by June 16, 2018.
• Jupyter Volunteer: You are eligible for this rate if you are contributing to the Jupyter planetary ecosystem as a volunteer via the code base or other contribution. Please include your GitHub ID or other relevant links.
• Alumni/Safari: You are eligible for this rate if you have attended a previous O’Reilly conference or have a current Safari membership.
• Group discounts: 20% off per person if you register 3-5 people from one company; use TEAM in the discount code field. We offer 25% off for teams of 6-9 and 30% off for 10 or more; please contact confreg@oreilly.com for details.

Or in general, save 20% on conference registration for having read this article all the way to the end! Use PJ20 in the discount code field.