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SPEAK AT BDW BUCHAREST 2025

Requirements and guidance for submitting papers

Call for Papers · BDW Bucharest 2026

Big Data & AI in Practice

We’re looking for practitioners, builders, and engineers who have shipped real systems, not just theorized about them. Share what you built, what broke, and what you learned.

When

October 6-7, 2026

Where

Bucharest, Romania

Submissions close

August 21, 2026

Language

English

About

We want the talks that slide decks can’t fake

Big Data Week Bucharest brings together engineers, data practitioners, architects, and technical leaders to exchange hard-won knowledge with Romania’s growing data and AI community. This year’s theme, Big Data & AI in Practice, is a deliberate filter: we’re prioritizing submissions grounded in real-world implementations, production systems, measurable outcomes, and honest stories over high-level overviews.

If you’ve wrestled a data pipeline into production, deployed an ML model that actually serves traffic, migrated a legacy warehouse under pressure, or built the platform layer that your org’s AI ambitions depend on, we want to hear your story.

Submit your proposal using the form on the conference website or via email at hello[at]bigdataweek.com.

Two Days, Two Tracks

A conference built around how things actually work

Each day is dedicated to a distinct discipline, so we can go deep instead of broad. Select the track that fits your expertise when submitting.

Day 1 · October 6

Practical Big Data Engineering

The infrastructure, pipelines, and platforms that power data-driven organizations. We’re looking for war stories from the engine room – architecture decisions, scaling challenges, performance wins, and the migrations nobody wanted but everyone needed.

  • Production data pipeline architectures
  • Lakehouse & data mesh in practice
  • Stream processing at scale (Kafka, Flink, Spark)
  • Data quality & observability in production
  • Cost optimization for cloud data platforms
  • DataOps & CI/CD for data workflows
  • Real-time analytics systems
  • Data governance that actually works
  • Legacy warehouse modernization
  • Open table formats (Iceberg, Delta, Hudi)
  • Performance tuning & query optimization
  • IoT data ingestion & edge processing
  • Internal data platforms & self-service tooling
  • Multi-cloud & hybrid data architectures

Day 2 · October 7

Applied AI

AI and ML systems that have made it past the demo stage. We want to hear about models in production, the infrastructure that supports them, the evaluation frameworks that keep them honest, and the organizational lessons from deploying AI at scale.

  • LLM-powered applications in production
  • RAG architectures & lessons learned
  • AI agents & agentic workflows
  • MLOps & ML platform engineering
  • Model evaluation, monitoring & guardrails
  • Fine-tuning on domain-specific data
  • AI for code, ops & developer productivity
  • Computer vision & NLP in industry
  • Responsible AI & bias mitigation in practice
  • Cost management for inference workloads
  • AI-augmented decision making & BI
  • Vector databases & semantic search at scale
  • Edge AI & on-device inference
  • Building AI-ready data foundations

Selection Criteria

What makes a strong submission

  • Production experience over theory. We heavily favor talks based on systems you’ve built, deployed, or operated – with concrete results, metrics, or lessons learned.
  • Honest stories are welcome. Things that went wrong are just as valuable as things that went right. Tell us about the failures, the pivots, and the trade-offs.
  • Specificity matters. “We used Flink to process 2M events/sec with exactly these tuning decisions” beats “stream processing is important” every time.
  • Actionable takeaways. Attendees should leave your talk with something they can apply on Monday morning.
  • Vendor-neutral framing. You can mention products you used, but the talk should be about the problem, the approach, and the outcome, not a product pitch.

Key Dates

Timeline

  • Aug 21, 2026
    Submission deadline
  • Sep 4, 2026
    Speaker notifications sent
  • Sep 25, 2026
    Final presentations due for content review
  • Oct 6-7, 2026
    Big Data Week Bucharest 2026

Types of Engagement

Pick your format

You can propose one or several speaking engagements. We have a limited number of slots per format, so early submissions are encouraged.

Conference Talk

A 40-minute presentation including Q&A. Deep dives into implementation details, architecture decisions, or real-world case studies.

Interactive Workshop

A half-day (3-hour) hands-on session with labs, demos, and in-depth technical exploration. Attendees should walk away having built or configured something real.

Submission Guidelines

A few practical notes

  • All presentations will be delivered in English.
  • Please make your abstract as clear and detailed as possible. If selected, it will appear on the conference website.
  • Accepted papers must be presentation-ready by September 25, 2026. The BDW organizing team will review all submitted content.
  • Presentations can be submitted as .pptx, .ppt, .doc, .docx, or .pdf files.
  • For speaker inquiries or to suggest a speaker, contact us at hello[at]bigdataweek.com.

Ready?

Submit your proposal and help shape BDW 2026

Join us in building a conference where every talk leaves the audience with something they can take back to their teams and put into practice.

    Name*

    Job Title*

    Company*

    Email*

    Phone*

    Speaker Bio*

    Where can we find you online? Please provide your Twitter, LinkedIn, and personal blog or website *

    Link to picture

    If you want another picture than your LinkedIn/Twitter picture.

    Track, Title and Abstract*

    Please make the abstract as clear and as detailed as possible. If selected, this summary will also appear on our website.

    Which stage are you applying for?*

    Have you spoken at other events in the past?*
    YesNo

    Is your company paying for your travel/accommodation expenses (if applicable)?*
    YesNo

    If you have, please provide some additional details

    Submit the paper/presentation

    Please submit your paper/presentation in one of the following formats: .doc, .docx, .ppt, .pptx, .pps or .ppsx. For any other suggestions of or request for speakers contact us via email: hello[at]bigdataweek.com.