Event listings: Back to school for IT pros

It’s that time of year again when kids head back to school — but it’s also a good time to brush up on your IT skills, stay on top of emerging trends and network with peers. There are plenty of events, summits and conferences coming up this fall that can help you ‘go back to school’ to meet your career goals and aspirations. Don’t have the budget? Many offer live-streaming options, so you don’t have to miss out. Here’s a taste of what’s on offer over the coming months:

TechCrunch Disrupt
San Francisco, Sept. 18-20
Disrupt gathers the best and brightest entrepreneurs, investors, hackers and tech fans to discuss what’s top of mind for the tech industry’s key innovators. Aside from debuting game-changing startups and technologies, it features on-stage interviews, the Startup Battlefield competition, a 24-hour Hackathon and Hardware Alley.

Strata Data Conference
New York, Sept. 25-28
Strata is designed for those looking to turn data into insight, efficiency and business value. Attendees can network with thousands of data scientists, engineers, analysts and business managers, and attend sessions on topics ranging from AI, big data and the cloud, data engineering, data-driven business, data science, enterprise adoption, machine learning, security, and sensors and IoT.

Future Festival
Toronto, Sept. 27-29
This three-day festival begins with immersive ‘safaris’ and a party with some of the hottest new tech releases to demo. The second day is content-focused, exploring some of the key drivers of new trends emerging for 2018 and beyond. The last day is focused on driving action from insight in application workshops.

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Orlando, Oct. 1-5
ITxpo is designed to help CIOs and senior IT executives turn their vision into action with a strategic view of emerging trends shaping IT and business. They’ll learn how to stay ahead of the latest technology trends in security and risk, IoT, AI and cloud. Attendees will be the first to hear Gartner’s latest research; this year features special programs for midsize enterprises and women in IT.

Geekwire Summit
Seattle, Oct. 9-11
More than 800 entrepreneurs, innovators, business executives and tech leaders gather at Geekwire to explore the future of the innovation economy. An immersive two-day conference, the summit features on-stage Q&As and interactive product demos by leaders in tech, science and business.

Deep Learning Summit Montreal
Montreal, Oct. 10-11
Here, attendees will discover applications of deep learning across industries including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, retail and utilities from experts in natural language processing, computer vision and image recognition. The summit will explore how to apply deep learning frameworks in areas such as predictive maintenance, risk analysis, demand and supply optimization, sentiment analysis, personalization and market targeting.

World Summit AI
Amsterdam, Oct. 11-12
This summit brings together more than 100 of the brightest brains in artificial intelligence with 2,000 of the world’s most active AI explorers. World Summit AI offers two days of knowledge-sharing, networking and keynote presentations, designed to help with innovation and progress in machine and deep learning while sparking new partnerships, investment projects and tech collaborations.

SecTor 2017
Toronto, Nov. 13-15
Illuminating the Black Art of Security, SecTor has built a reputation of bringing together experts from around the world to share their latest research and techniques involving cyber threats and corporate defenses. SecTor sheds light on the underground threats and mischief that threaten corporate and personal IT systems — and discusses, dissects and debates the strongest defenses to these threats.

Tech Up For Women
New York, Nov. 14
This one-day event focuses on technological advances, cybersecurity and financing avenues for startups and privately held companies. It provides resources and opportunities for women to improve their digital literacy and successfully compete and disrupt gender imbalance in work environments.

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