On 31 July 2024, the Singapore Chapter of SIGKDD organized a full-day symposium. It was a rich program that among other things featured presentations of papers by authors based in Singapore that had been accepted in recent conferences such as KDD-24, SIGIR-24, ICML-24, IJCAI-24, WWW-24, ACL-24, NeurIPS-23, etc. The event was attended by more than 50 participants from various universities and companies.

The day featured three invited talks on various topics. The first morning talk was given by Zhenhua Dong, who gave us comprehensive perspectives on biases in recommender system, covering both out of distribution and unfairness. The second morning talk was given by Wenxuan Zhang, who took us through the several interesting works in advancing multilingual large language models. The afternoon talk was given by Shonali Krishnaswamy, who gave a captivating sharing of her successful AI startup journey.

For the first time, we ran the presentations along two tracks: Research Track, managed by Yuan Fang and Cheng Long, as well as Applied Data Science Track, managed by Yong Liu and Wee Siong Ng. The research track featured seven oral presentations and eleven posters, while the applied data science track featured two oral presentations.

At the end of the day, we announced several awards based on audience feedback, but the reality was that all attendees won, because we all gained insights and friendships.