The speaker lineup for this data science and engineering conf at New Lab is impressive

It looks like New Lab has become a prime destination for tech-focused events in New York City.
Fresh off the heels of defense organization MD5‘s hackathon, it’s hosting DataEngConf, a two-day data conference organized by New York- and San Francisco-based company Hakka Labs, on November 3 and 4. The goal of the event, per its website, is to bridge the gap between data scientists and engineers.
The conference has a pretty hefty price tag, at $699, but Hakka Labs is running a 20-percent-off promotion with the code “data20.” The discount gets you pretty close — give or take 20 cents — to the early bird rate of $559.
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It features a formidable lineup. Speakers include Duncan Watts of Microsoft Research, Hilary Mason of Fast Forward Labs, Erin Palmer of Spotify, Parag Agrawal of Twitter and Ben Wellington of Two Sigma, who is perhaps best known for his blog I Quant NY.
Judging by the schedule, it looks like the sessions will dive into the nitty-gritty of applied data science and engineering. Agrawal, for instance, is leading a session on neural network feed ranking at Twitter. Palmer’s talk will focus on unified pipeline architecture. There are some bigger picture talks, too, including Wellington’s keynote on how data science can influence how cities run.
Data, of course, is a hot topic these days. As artificial intelligence moves from buzzword into reality, it’s raised some pretty troubling possibilities, such as reinforcing race bias in policing. While this conference doesn’t have a policy focus, its speakers are set to address questions such as the possibilities and limits of what’s now being billed as “computational social science.”