Call for Speakers — Data Makers Fest 2026

[Leonid Kholkine]

Dear all,

We’re excited to announce the next edition of Data Makers Fest (DMF)! It's a 3-day festival for people who build with data: data scientists, engineers, ML practitioners, AI researchers, and data leaders. The event will happen 4-6 of May 2026.

Data Makers Festival isn’t your typical tech conference. It’s for data people, by data people, a space where industry and academia come together to learn, build, and share. A place for makers geeking out over the latest ideas, tools, and discoveries.

This year, we’ll gather 1,000+ data makers in Porto, Portugal for hands-on tutorials, talks, and roundtables. The audience is diverse: academia, startups, corporations, and public institutions.

🎯 What we’re looking for

We welcome talks from both academia and industry (including already published work, as long as you tailor it for practitioners). During the topics, the following topics will be touched upon:

• Core Machine Learning: Classical & deep-learning algorithms, forecasting, recommendation, IR, time-series, tabular ML.
• Generative AI & LLMs: LLM fine-tuning, RAG, diffusion, prompt engineering, agentic AI.
• Engineering: Pipelines, lake-house, orchestration, feature stores, CI/CD for models, monitoring, analytics engineering.
• Analytics & visualization: Dashboards, storytelling, self-service BI, semantics layers.
• Responsible AI & Safety: Fairness, explainability, privacy, red-teaming, policy & compliance.
• Frontiers: Any topics that are becoming or are on the frontier to becoming adopted by industry, such as new foundation-model systems, causal ML, multimodal, retrieval-augmented agents, federated learning.
• Domain Applications: Sector case-studies (such as health, finance, and retail).
• Leadership: Data product management, team design, ROI, budgeting, org change, vendor selection.

🎁 Why apply?

Speaking at DMF comes with benefits designed to support and celebrate our speakers:

• Recognition of your work in front of 1,000+ practitioners
• Speaker coaching to refine your talk
• A free festival ticket (with lunch included)
• Access to an exclusive networking dinner
• Professional recording of your talk shared with the participants (and possibly publicly under Creative Commons)

Besides these benefits, if needed, we can help with your travel (up to 300€) and accomodation (up to 180€).  

📅 Key Dates

• 30 October: Deadline to submit your talk

• 30 November: Decision of the evaluation

• 10 December: Deadline to confirm you participation

👉 Read the application guidelines here and apply here.

We can’t wait to see your ideas on stage!

Warm regards,
The Data Makers Fest team