The Ray Summit, the annual Ray community conference, is back in 2023 for a two-day, in-person event later this year (September 18-19) in San Francisco, CA, along with an additional day for all-day training on September 20th.

Last year’s Ray Summit 2022 was a stellar success, with luminary and visionaries keynotes from IBM, OpenAI, Uber, Meta AI, and UC Berkeley, along with two days of technical Ray deep dives, Ray use cases, lightning talks, and Ray training. This time around, we’ll strive to double the sessions from the community, including training.

We are currently accepting proposals for conference talks, with a submission deadline of February 17th.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the most frequently asked questions about the Call for Proposals (CfPs)  and will give you all the information you need to prepare a stellar Ray Summit proposal.

LinkWhat are the benefits of speaking at Ray Summit?

There are three main benefits to speaking at Ray Summit:

• First, it’s an opportunity to share your Ray expertise and knowledge with the growing global Ray community, giving your work wider technical recognition. This can lead to more machine learning practitioners (including other speakers) connecting with you or seeking your advice, boosting your personal brand.

• Second, you’ll be able to build your public speaking and presentation skills. Particularly if you plan to apply to other conferences that require previous speaking experience; speaking at Ray Summit is a great opportunity to build that experience. We also record and share all sessions, which are publicly available for a global audience.

• And finally, as a speaker, you’ll get a free pass to attend Ray Summit, including some social and networking events.

LinkWhat are the key themes for this year’s Ray Summit?

The key themes and topics of interest for Ray Summit 2023 are no different from last year, with some additional topics since Ray is moving fast, and the community is using Ray for varying scalable workloads and use cases:

• Simple and scalable ML use cases or workloads solved with Ray libraries and ecosystem

• Scalable ML/AI: feature engineering, distributed training, or hyperparameter tuning for use cases such as graph neural networks, computer vision, time-series, and training and serving many multiple models at scale

• Training or tuning transformers for generative AI for NLP tasks

• AI/ML platforms and infrastructure or end-to-end applications: data processing through model training, serving, workflow orchestration, and monitoring

• Deep dives into Ray core components and Ray libraries

• Reinforcement learning in the real world (recommendation systems, trading agents, etc.) built with Ray libraries or other frameworks

• Building your own distributed framework using Ray Core API patterns or on top of Ray libraries

• Cloud computing topics such as serverless computing and multi-cloud Ray deployments on Kubernetes, on-premises, or public cloud

• Integrations of common ML libraries and frameworks with Ray libraries and ecosystem

LinkWhat types of talks can I submit?

We have two categories of talks you can submit on the above themes and topics:

• Technical Lightning Talks (15 minutes): Short technical talks covering the what, why, and how of a topic with digestible code examples or quick demos.

• Technical Talks (30 minutes): Talks that are rich in technical detail, including code examples or demos that help the audience grasp a problem you set out to solve, challenges you met along the way, your solution, what are the takeaways, and who is the audience: the what, why, how, and for whom.

For all the talks, the audience should walk away having learned something new.

LinkThis is my first time. Any tips for preparing a proposal?

Submitting a talk to a CFP can be overwhelming, but if you focus on a few key areas, it’s easy to make sure the value of your idea shines through. Here are a few tips for submitting a successful proposal:

• Start with a simple and straightforward title. You only have a few seconds to grab your audience’s attention.

• Avoid using your proposal as a sales or product pitch.

• Keep it focused. You probably won’t have time to cover everything about your topic — choose a specific angle or technique to focus on.

• Edit, edit, edit. Once you’ve written your abstract, be sure to read it over several times to make sure that it tells a clear story. Eliminate unnecessary words and sentences: sentence is a form a thought takes. Share with a trusted peer and get feedback.

Finally, always keep your audience in mind. Explain why people will want to attend your talk and what they’ll learn from it with three numbered takeaways.

For more guidance, check out the following resources:

• 7 step guide to writing a winning tech conference CFP

• 10 Tips for getting that conference CFP accepted

• CFP Tips and Tricks for Tech Conferences

LinkHow many speakers per talk?

We allow at most two speakers per proposal, so you can only include yourself and your co-speaker during the submission process.

LinkHow do I submit my talk?

Simple. Just head over to our Ray Summit 2023 CfP page and click on Submit a talk. The submission deadline is March 6th, 2023. We are looking forward to your submission. Good luck!