Some links on this page are affiliate links: if you buy through them we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
Major research conferences, practitioner events, and commercial AI summits all appeared on the 2018 calendar—but they served very different audiences. This is a historical guide to the events listed in Big Cloud’s 2018 roundup, not a current registration calendar. Dates have passed, and surviving event pages may no longer describe the 2018 edition. Where the roundup does not provide an exact date, this guide gives the month rather than guessing.
How to read the 2018 calendar
The roundup collected more than 90 entries across research, applied data science, robotics, business, and technology events. Its breadth is useful as a record of what was being promoted to AI and data professionals, but it is not a ranking: a peer-reviewed research conference, a hands-on practitioner event, and a vendor-led expo are not equivalent venues.
Event names, months, and cities below follow the roundup. Exact date ranges are included where the source specifies them; otherwise, the month is the available date information. The roundup is the source for the calendar entries unless a separate program link is provided. Its surviving links can help locate historical material, but a current homepage should not be assumed to preserve the 2018 program.
Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches- Research conference: primarily a venue for presenting and discussing scholarly work.
- Applied or practitioner event: generally oriented toward techniques, tools, case studies, or implementation.
- Commercial summit or expo: often combines executive or industry talks with vendor demonstrations and business networking.
- Specialist, workshop, or community event: concentrates on a technical niche, a focused topic, or a professional community.
The major research conferences of 2018
For readers seeking research papers, technical presentations, and academic networking, these were the most recognizable anchors in the year’s calendar. The roundup supplies the dates and locations shown here; it does not establish that every listed event used the same review or publication process.
#1 Best Overall
| Conference | 2018 dates | Location | Research focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAAI-18 | February 2–7 | New Orleans, United States | Artificial intelligence |
| ICLR 2018 | April 30–May 3 | Vancouver, Canada | Deep learning and representation learning |
| NAACL 2018 | June 1–6 | New Orleans, United States | Natural-language processing |
| CVPR 2018 | June 18–22 | Salt Lake City, United States | Computer vision and pattern recognition |
| ICML 2018 | July 10–15 | Stockholm, Sweden | Machine learning |
| ACL 2018 | July 15–20 | Melbourne, Australia | Computational linguistics and NLP |
| ECCV 2018 | September 8–14 | Munich, Germany | Computer vision |
| IROS 2018 | October 1–5 | Madrid, Spain | Intelligent robots and systems |
| NeurIPS 2018 | December 3–8 | Montréal, Canada | Machine learning and computational neuroscience |
What the research calendar covered
These events mark distinct communities rather than one interchangeable AI circuit. AAAI covered AI broadly; ICLR and ICML were central destinations for machine-learning research; NeurIPS provided a major year-end meeting for machine learning and computational neuroscience. For language research, NAACL and ACL appeared in June and July. Vision researchers had CVPR and ECCV, while IROS addressed robotics and intelligent systems.
Other research-oriented entries broadened the map: SIAM Data Mining in San Diego, PAKDD in Melbourne, CIKM in Turin, BMVC in Newcastle, ICPR in Beijing, COLING in Santa Fe, and Robotics: Science and Systems in Pittsburgh. The calendar also included HRI in Chicago, RoboSoft in Livorno, and ACM IUI in Tokyo. Exact dates for these entries are not stated here because the roundup’s summarized information does not establish them.
Applied data-science and practitioner events
Practitioner-oriented conferences were a better fit for attendees looking for tutorials, workflow guidance, tool ecosystems, or lessons from deploying systems. They could be more useful to working engineers and data scientists than a research meeting, even when they did not offer the same emphasis on scholarly papers.
- Applied Machine Learning Days — Lausanne, January. The roundup positioned this as an applied machine-learning gathering.
- ODSC East — Boston, May; ODSC West — San Francisco, October. Open Data Science Conference events were listed for data-science and machine-learning practitioners.
- Strata Data Conference — London, May. Its 2018 speakers and program page shows a practical mix including data science, machine learning, AI, streaming, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes, production systems, interpretability, data governance, and GDPR-related questions.
- Predictive Analytics World — industry-focused edition in Munich, June; London, October; and Berlin, November. The roundup also lists a Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit in Chicago, October.
- Data Conference — Lisbon, July; Data Natives — Berlin, November. These entries offered broader practitioner and community contexts than a single-discipline research conference.
- Nordic Data Science and Machine Learning Summit — Stockholm, October; Machine Learning Innovation Summit — Dublin, December.
The practical distinction is visible in the Strata London program: alongside algorithms and AI, the agenda addressed infrastructure, governance, and getting models into production. That reflects an important 2018 practitioner concern—the work did not end when a model was trained. The program is evidence of topics on that event’s schedule, not a claim that every practitioner event covered them.
Enterprise AI summits and expos
Business-focused events were aimed more often at executives, technology decision-makers, vendors, and teams evaluating adoption than at researchers presenting papers. They could be useful for enterprise use cases, product demonstrations, procurement conversations, and industry networking; the trade-off is that programming may include more sponsorship and sales messaging.
- AI Summit: Hong Kong in July and San Francisco in September. The roundup also lists World Summit AI in Amsterdam in October.
- AI Expo North America: Santa Clara in November. The roundup places it among broad technology expos rather than specialist research conferences.
- Gartner Data & Analytics Summit: Sydney in February and London in March.
- Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit: Hong Kong in April, London in November, and Beijing in November.
- Other business and technology entries: AI World Conference and Expo, Future Tech Expo in Dallas in September, Arm TechCon in San Jose in October, and AI Expo Global in London in April.
Descriptions of the AI Summit as emphasizing practical enterprise implications, or of AI Expo as combining AI with IoT and blockchain, came from event marketing and contemporary event listings. Treat such descriptions as audience-positioning, not independent assessments of technical depth. For a secondary contemporary overview, see Singularity Search’s machine-learning conference guide.
Specialist tracks beyond general machine learning
Computer vision and visual computing
CVPR in June and ECCV in September were the calendar’s prominent vision research meetings. Other listed options included BMVC in Newcastle in September, ICPR in Beijing in August, SIGGRAPH in Vancouver in August, and LDV Vision Summit in New York in May. SIGGRAPH covers visual computing more broadly than machine learning alone, so it should not be read as a pure ML conference.
The Tool Desk
Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Language technology and knowledge discovery
NAACL and ACL were the main NLP anchors, with COLING in Santa Fe in August also serving language technology. Data mining and knowledge discovery appeared through SIAM Data Mining in May, PAKDD in June, CIKM in October, and additional industrial and machine-learning/data-mining meetings in New York in July.
Robotics, human interaction, and autonomous systems
Alongside IROS, the calendar included ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction in Chicago in March, RoboSoft in Livorno in April, Robotics: Science and Systems in Pittsburgh in June, SIMPAR in Brisbane in May, and IEEE Automation Science and Engineering in Munich in August. These events sit at the intersection of AI, control, hardware, and human factors; they are not simply general-purpose ML gatherings.
Rank #4
Finance, healthcare, and social impact
Special-purpose entries included AI and sentiment analysis in finance in Hong Kong in March, AI and machine learning in finance in London in June, Predictive Analytics World Industry 4.0 in Munich in June, and the Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in London in September. AI on a Social Mission in Montréal in January and AI-for-social-impact programming point to a parallel strand concerned with applications and societal aims. The roundup also listed Women in Data Science at Stanford in March and Women in AI dinners in London in February and Toronto in October; these were community and inclusion events, not substitutes for a technical research program.
2018 calendar by month
This month-by-month index retains the roundup’s breadth while labeling each entry by its apparent role. “Month listed” means the source summary does not give a reliable exact date here. Cross-month dates are shown as ranges when supplied.
January
- Global Artificial Intelligence Conference — Santa Clara; applied/industry event, month listed.
- AI NEXTCon — Seattle; applied/industry event, month listed.
- AI on a Social Mission Conference — Montréal; social-impact event, month listed.
- Applied Machine Learning Days — Lausanne; practitioner event, month listed.
- International Chatbot Summit — Tel Aviv; specialist event, month listed.
February
- AAAI-18 — New Orleans, February 2–7; research conference.
- Big Data & Analytics Summit — Toronto; commercial/practitioner event, month listed.
- Robophilosophy — Vienna; specialist event, month listed.
- Women in AI Dinner — London; community event, month listed.
- Gartner Data & Analytics Summit — Sydney; enterprise event, month listed.
- ICMLC — Macau; research/specialist event, month listed.
- AI 4 Business Summit — Lint, Belgium; business event, month listed.
March
- Women in Data Science — Stanford; community and technical event, month listed.
- European Artificial Intelligence Innovation Summit — London; applied/industry event, month listed.
- ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction — Chicago; research/specialist event, month listed.
- AI and Sentiment Analysis in Finance — Hong Kong; specialist event, month listed.
- ACM IUI — Tokyo; research conference, month listed.
- Gartner Data & Analytics Summit — London; enterprise event, month listed.
- Data Innovation Summit — Stockholm; practitioner event, month listed.
- Advanced Computational Intelligence — Xiamen; research/specialist event, month listed.
April
- Future of Information and Communication Conference — Singapore; technology/research event, month listed.
- O’Reilly AI Conference — Beijing; practitioner/industry event, month listed.
- Applied Artificial Intelligence Conference — San Francisco; practitioner event, month listed.
- ICASSP — Calgary; signal-processing research event, month listed.
- Automation and Robotics — Las Vegas; specialist event, month listed.
- Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit — Hong Kong; enterprise event, month listed.
- AI Expo Global — London; commercial expo, month listed.
- RPA & AI Summit — Copenhagen; applied/industry event, month listed.
- RoboSoft — Livorno; robotics event, month listed.
- European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks — Bruges; research event, month listed.
- ICLR 2018 — Vancouver, April 30–May 3; research conference.
May
- ODSC East — Boston; practitioner event, month listed.
- SIAM Data Mining — San Diego; research conference, month listed.
- SIMPAR — Brisbane; robotics research event, month listed.
- Rise of AI — Berlin; applied/industry event, month listed.
- Strata Data Conference — London; practitioner event, month listed.
- LDV Vision Summit — New York; specialist event, month listed.
- Deep Learning Summit — Boston; specialist/applied event, month listed.
- Dot.AI — Paris; applied/industry event, month listed.
June
- NAACL 2018 — New Orleans, June 1–6; research conference.
- PAKDD — Melbourne; data-mining research event, month listed.
- Machine Intelligence Summit — Hong Kong; applied/industry event, month listed.
- CogX — London; broad AI event, month listed.
- Predictive Analytics World Industry 4.0 — Munich; specialist/practitioner event, month listed.
- Conference for Machine Learning Innovation — Munich; applied event, month listed.
- CVPR 2018 — Salt Lake City, June 18–22; research conference.
- Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence — Toledo; research/specialist event, month listed.
- Applied Intelligent Systems — Montréal; specialist event, month listed.
- Robotics: Science and Systems — Pittsburgh; research conference, month listed.
- AI and machine learning in finance — London; specialist event, month listed.
- AI in Industrial Automation Summit — San Francisco; industry event, month listed.
July
- AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing — Zurich; research/specialist event, month listed.
- ICML 2018 — Stockholm, July 10–15; research conference.
- Industrial Conference on Data Mining — New York; specialist event, month listed.
- Machine Learning and Data Mining — New York; specialist event, month listed.
- ACL 2018 — Melbourne, July 15–20; research conference.
- Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence Summit — Rome; applied event, month listed.
- AI Summit — Hong Kong; enterprise event, month listed.
- Data Conference — Lisbon; practitioner event, month listed.
August
- SIGGRAPH 2018 — Vancouver; visual computing event, month listed.
- ICPR 2018 — Beijing; pattern-recognition research event, month listed.
- IEEE Automation Science and Engineering — Munich; research/specialist event, month listed.
- COLING 2018 — Santa Fe; language-technology research event, month listed.
- Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & IoT — Paris; applied/specialist event, month listed.
September
- BMVC — Newcastle; computer-vision research event, month listed.
- O’Reilly AI Conference — San Francisco; practitioner/industry event, month listed.
- ECCV 2018 — Munich, September 8–14; research conference.
- Advances in AI and Applications — Poznań; research/specialist event, month listed.
- Robots and Deep Learning — Singapore; specialist event, month listed.
- Big Data Innovation Summit — Boston; enterprise event, month listed.
- Future Tech Expo — Dallas; commercial expo, month listed.
- AI Summit — San Francisco; enterprise event, month listed.
- IJCCI and CHIRA — Seville; research/specialist events, month listed.
- Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit — London; healthcare-focused event, month listed.
- Auto AI — Berlin; applied/industry event, month listed.
- High-Performance Machine Learning Workshop — Lyon; workshop, month listed.
- Advanced Robotics and Social Impacts — Genoa; specialist event, month listed.
October
- IROS 2018 — Madrid, October 1–5; research conference.
- World Summit AI — Amsterdam; enterprise AI summit, month listed.
- Arm TechCon — San Jose; technology conference, month listed.
- Nordic Data Science and Machine Learning Summit — Stockholm; practitioner/industry event, month listed.
- Predictive Analytics World — London; practitioner event, month listed.
- CIKM — Turin; research conference, month listed.
- Women in AI Dinner — Toronto; community event, month listed.
- Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit — Chicago; enterprise/practitioner event, month listed.
- ODSC West — San Francisco; practitioner event, month listed.
November
- Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit — London and Beijing; enterprise events, month listed.
- Predictive Analytics World — Berlin; practitioner event, month listed.
- Future Technologies Conference — Vancouver; technology event, month listed.
- Data Natives — Berlin; data-science community/practitioner event, month listed.
- AI Expo North America — Santa Clara; commercial expo, month listed.
December
- NeurIPS 2018 — Montréal, December 3–8; research conference.
- Big Data & Machine Learning Leaders Summit — Hong Kong; enterprise event, month listed.
- Machine Learning Innovation Summit — Dublin; practitioner/industry event, month listed.
- SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence — Cambridge; research conference, month listed.
Which kind of event should you choose?
- Academic researchers and graduate students: start with the discipline-specific research venues—AAAI, ICLR, CVPR, ICML, ACL, NAACL, ECCV, IROS, or NeurIPS. A specialist meeting such as CIKM, SIAM Data Mining, or HRI may be a closer match for focused work.
- ML engineers and data scientists: consider ODSC, Strata, Applied Machine Learning Days, or Predictive Analytics World for applied material. Check the historical program rather than relying on the event brand alone.
- Executives and technology decision-makers: enterprise summits and expos such as the AI Summit, Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, World Summit AI, and AI Expo were positioned toward adoption, vendors, and business applications.
- Specialists: choose by discipline—CVPR/ECCV/BMVC for vision; ACL/NAACL/COLING for language; IROS/RSS/RoboSoft/HRI for robotics and human interaction; SIAM Data Mining/PAKDD/CIKM for data mining and information discovery.
- Attendees prioritizing inclusion or social impact: Women in Data Science, Women in AI community events, and AI on a Social Mission served different purposes from paper-centered conferences.
There is no defensible single ranking across these categories. Research prestige, training value, deployment relevance, networking, and access to vendors are different reasons to attend; the best fit depends on which outcome matters.
What the 2018 program mix says about the field
The calendar shows machine learning embedded in several overlapping ecosystems rather than confined to a standalone AI conference circuit. Vision, NLP, robotics, data mining, healthcare, finance, and enterprise analytics each had their own specialist meetings. At the same time, practitioner programs increasingly dealt with deployment infrastructure, streaming data, interpretability, governance, and regulatory concerns. Strata Europe’s 2018 schedule is a concrete example of those operational themes alongside model-focused material.
This is a retrospective of what the listed 2018 events covered or represented, not a claim that later developments were already present at them. As a record, the roundup is most useful for identifying event names, locations, and the scope of the year’s ecosystem; the exact surviving program and status of individual events should be checked against the linked historical or organizer pages when that detail matters.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
What’s actually slowing this PC down?
Pick the symptom - the matching free tool is one click away.
