Come Connect with Graph Folks at Data Day Texas!
Since I know you don’t have any other plans in late January (who in the world makes plans for late January?), you’re going to be at the hottest indy developer event of the year, right?
Data Day Texas – now officially “Data Weekend” – is essentially the South by Southwest of the NoSQL / Big Data / Data Science / ML / Graph world. It’s edgy, it’s independent, and it’s where real people have real discussions about technology they actually use.
Returning for its 16th edition, Data Day Texas happens on January 24-25th on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin (register here). This year, G.V() is a proud patron of the conference, so we hope to see you there!
Here are just a few more reasons why we think Data Day Texas is an event you won’t want to miss.
Graph Visualization Keynote & Talks from the G.V() Team
Two members of the G.V() team will be presenting at Data Day Texas 2026, and both sessions will be well worth your time.
Data Day (Weekend) Texas
Dates: January 24-25, 2026
Location: The AT&T Hotel and Conference Center at the University of Texas at Austin
First up is the Data Visualization Keynote delivered by G.V()’s very own Christian Miles. His talk is titled “Who Needs a Chart When You Can Just Chat? The Role of Data Visualization in a Post-LLM World.”
Data visualisation faces an existential question: in a world where users can simply ask questions of their data in natural language, what role remains for visual representation? In this talk, we’ll explore this tension. While LLMs reshape how people access data, visualisation remains essential – charts surface outliers, gaps, and distributions without requiring you to ask the right question.
Christian will examine where AI advances visualisation practice (accelerated prototyping, simulated user testing, democratised tooling) while calling out current dead ends. Graph visualisation gets particular focus: a foundational model for understanding the connected world, with LLMs enabling new interactive experiences.
Christian will then go on to examine visualisation’s role in AI interpretability research and conclude with a jobs-to-be-done reframe: which jobs do charts do that LLMs structurally cannot absorb?
Also not to be missed, G.V() CEO & Founder Arthur Bigeard will be giving a talk about the graph database user experience.
Relational databases have set the bar high with a mature ecosystem of tools: IDEs, data modeling, ETL, BI, query language standardization, etc. Graph databases pale in comparison. For users, it’s a downgrade. For graph db vendors, it’s a barrier to adoption.
In this talk, he’ll cover the key requirements of the graph db user experience, how they map to the various technologies available, and the work G.V() has been doing to help bridge the gap with the relational industry. This session is for anyone considering a graph data project for 2026 or for anyone already anywhere between toe- and neck-deep in one.
More Graph Tech Talks at Data Day Texas
Data Day Texas has always been a great place for graph folks to gather, and this year, there’s almost too many graph speakers to list them all, but here’s my vainglorious attempt to do so all the same.
Dr. Clair Sullivan is a former Neo4j colleague of mine, and she’s also the OG graph data scientist. She’s even got a LinkedIn Learning course on GraphRAG if you don’t believe me. These days, she’s an indy data scientist consultant and solopreneur helping clients succeed in their graph data science practice. Prior to graphs, she studied nuclear engineering, which means she’s probably personally saved you from at least 3 nuclear meltdowns in your lifetime [citation needed]. At Data Day Texas, she’s presenting on layoff-proofing your data career through solopreneurship.
David Hughes is the Principal Data & AI Solution Architect at Enterprise Knowledge, so you know he’s a smart cookie. He’s deeply knowledgeable about graphs, but he’s also a bit of an open source-rer because he knows all the other tools, platforms, and workflows you need in place to get the most out of graph technology – particularly for self-optimizing agents.Not sure about this guy, but something just says “wizard vibes.”
Also known as the Librarian of All Knowledge, Jessica Talisman is an indy taxonomist, educator, information architect, and “former” librarian. She’s also the mind behind the Ontology Pipeline, which of course is why she’s delivering the Ontology Keynote at Data Day Texas. Last time I interviewed Jessica was at ODSC West for GraphGeeks (video forthcoming), and she’s a sharp mind who thinks in graphs you haven’t even dreamed of.
Formerly of TigerGraph, Dr. Weimo Liu made the feline-to-canine switch and now he’s the CEO and Co-Founder of PuppyGraph. He also spent some time at Google where he worked on the F1 team developing the unified SQL analytics engine that supports most data formats/sources and serves billions of queries per day. At Data Day Texas, he’ll be hosting an AMA on the PuppyGraph graph query engine.
Dr. Joshua Shinavier is a co-founder of Apache TinkerPop and therefore a primordial being of the graph database domain. He earned his PhD in computer science from the Tetherless World Constellation, where he took the opportunity to explore the strange no man’s land between graphs, cognition, and augmented reality. Over the last decade, Josh has been working on the Hydra graph programming language (great explainer/demo here), and he’ll be delivering the Hydra Keynote at Data Day Texas.
To the graph world, Dr. Juan Sequeda needs no real introduction. His resume of research is printed by the ream with knowledge graph experience that bridges the gap between academia and industry, co-chairing working groups on property graphs and query languages for the LDBC (now GDC) and helping set standards with the W3C, just as a start. A PhD in CompSci from the University of Texas at Austin, Juan will be presenting at Data Day Texas from his own backyard on battle scars from 20 years of building ontologies and knowledge graphs. You can’t miss it.
Dr. Jan Aasman is the CEO of Franz, Inc., the company behind the AllegroGraph graph database. With an expertise in cognitive science, Jan has been working as an early innovator at the intersection of industry, government, and academia for decades, particularly in the realms of knowledge graphs and artificial intelligence. While others might claim to be AI experts, this guy’s got the receipts.
The last major graph expert presenting at Data Day Texas is Adriano Vlad-Starrabba. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Prometheux – an ontology-native data engine – Adriano works to solve problems at the nexus of AI, data infrastructure, and logic-based reasoning. I briefly met Adriano at last year’s Knowledge Graph Conference, and he was well-received by the graph community there. Oh, and on the side he lectures at Oxford University, nbd.
Other Speakers & Talks You Don’t Want to Miss at Data Day Texas
Data Day Texas isn’t just a graph event – and that’s a good thing! – so while I can’t do a rundown of allllll the speakers at this year’s event, here’s a few more non-graph folks you’ll want to track down at the conference.
Prashanth Rao is technically not speaking about graphs at Data Day Texas, but he’s so intensely graph adjacent (previously at Kuzu, may it rest in peace) that I couldn’t leave him off the list. The dude’s got graph cred and db cred, so even though he’s presenting on LanceDB, he’s a mind you don’t want to miss.
Kierra Dotson has all the dev chops: K8s, DevOps, BI, and data engineering. But she’s also gonna help you get a raise, build a career, and navigate the business side of technical greatness. You can bet we’ll be seated on the front row of her session on the reality of AI strategy.
BAML is so hot right now, and at Data Day Texas, you can meet the creator of BAML himself. I got to see Vaibhav Gupta present at Graph the Planet 2025, and besides having an awesome technology to share with you, he’s also a fun presenter.
Lena Hall is an AI and data engineering master. She’s the CEO & Founder of Droid AI and a YouTube extraordinaire. At Data Day Texas, she’ll be presenting “Context > Prompts: Context Engineering Deep Dive” which isn’t explicitly graphy…but sounds sorta graphy, so we’ll be attending her talk too.
Tim Berglund is a devrel guy who seriously knows his stuff. He’s been making videos about Apache Kafka longer than you’ve been alive, son. He’s also giving the Apache Iceberg keynote at Data Day Texas, so he’s another great speaker you can’t pass over. (Full disclosure, he’s from my hometown of Arvada, Colorado, which may or may not have been the primary reason I picked him)
Can’t Wait to Connect with You at Data Day Texas
Now that the case has been made, we hope to see you at Data Day/Weekend Texas, not only for the presentations and workshops but also for the conversations and connections. There will be plenty of graph and graph-adjacent talks to attend, including from the G.V() team, and plenty of non-graph-but-plenty-interesting presentations too.
We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
Stop kidding yourself: You don’t have plans for late January. Get yourself to Data Day Texas and prepare to level up your dev game.
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