Love Data Week 2026 (February 9–13) is a Big Ten–wide celebration of data that gives students a fun way to build data skills, explore AI topics, and connect with others who like working with data.
What Love Data Week Is
- A week of virtual and partner-hosted events across Big Ten Academic Alliance schools focused on how data shapes research, learning, and everyday life.
- Sessions include hands-on workshops, expert talks, and networking spaces designed to help you discover new tools, methods, and data-related career paths.
Why Students Should Join
- Boost your data literacy for classes, research, internships, and future careers while learning about hot topics like AI “hallucinations” and responsible AI use.
- Meet students, faculty, and professionals from across the Big Ten who share an interest in data, visualization, and analytics.
Data Viz Championship
- The centerpiece of the week is the Data Viz Championship, where students, faculty, and staff compete for the Big Ten Academic Alliance Data Viz Champion title by submitting creative visualizations.
- For 2026, current Big Ten students who are not graduating before February 2026 are invited to create a data visualization centered on university fight songs, using a shared dataset provided by organizers.
Events and Topics
- The event schedule features sessions on cutting-edge data and AI topics, federal data regulations, and a live data visualization showdown between member universities.
- The week wraps up with the Data Viz Championship event, showcasing standout visualizations and highlighting creative ways to tell stories with data.
Getting Connected
- Each Big Ten institution has a coordinator who can help connect you to Love Data Week activities; at Maryland, the institutional coordinator is Michelle Appel.
- Students with questions about the overall event can also reach out to the Big Ten Academic Alliance Programs Team contacts listed on the Love Data Week webpage.
