2026 ASU Data Conference
ASU is hosting its 10th annual Data Conference, where members of the data community will gather for two days of networking, knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Come hear about the tools that your peers use to extract and query data, create visualizations and build the tools that enable ASU leaders to make data-informed decisions every day.
In addition to a full slate of presentation sessions from your colleagues, this year’s conference will feature a “Tool Bar” where you can stop by and chat with data experts!
That’s not all – back by popular demand is our Sliced! live data visualization competition. Come cheer on your fellow data experts as they create data viz magic and compete to see who will be crowned Sliced! Champion!
Step Up to the Data Tool Bar at the Data Conference!
In addition to an exciting lineup of presentation sessions from your peers, we’re bringing back the Data Tool Bar—your in-person hub for real-time insights, expert advice, and hands-on demos. Throughout the entire conference, you can drop by and chat with data pros from external vendors to, of course, Enterprise Technology at ASU.
Whether you're curious about the latest data solutions, want to see cutting-edge tools in action, or have burning questions about how to level up your data game, the Data Tool Bar has it all! Our industry specialists are here to guide you, answer your questions, and show you the tech that’s shaping the future of data.
Stop by, grab a spot, and dive into the data-driven discussions! The Data Tool Bar is open throughout the conference—don’t miss your chance to connect with the experts.
Agenda
Each session is represented by a distinct colored line, with the length of the line indicating the duration of the session. The color serves as a quick visual reference, allowing easy differentiation between individual sessions.
Single Session Sponsored Session
November 17, 2026
8:30 a.m. Doors Open
A light continental breakfast will be available at this time in the Arizona Ball Room.
At the same time the Tool Bar Expo will begin in the same room. If you miss out on getting to check it out before the Welcome, there will be a 15-20 minute transition period after the Keynote is finished in which attendees are able to browse through the Expo, before proceeding to the Breakout Sessions.
9:00 a.m. Welcome & Keynote
10:10 a.m. Breakout Session
Room:
Presented By: Jared Scolaro
Take a look back at five years of course outcomes with ASU's new Course Outcomes Dashboard. This session introduces a powerful new tool that helps the colleges, the graduate college, ASU online, and other partners identify their most and least successful courses using historical student outcome data.
Learn how the dashboard can uncover trends, support data-informed decisions, and help focus student success efforts. So be kind, rewind... because the past has a lot to teach us about the future.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Margeaux Ciraolo
AI Tools are an integral part of ASU’s innovation-first culture. Using them responsibly is everyone’s job. The purpose of this session is to explore practical decision-making for faculty and staff working with all types of university data. Using real-world examples from the Privacy and Data Governance Advisory Committee, we will learn how to evaluate AI use cases, recognize different levels of data sensitivity, understand institutional guardrails, and how to seek guidance along the way.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Nishanth Prathap
DARS (Degree Audit Reporting System) data provides a detailed view of how a student's coursework satisfies degree requirements and tracks their progress toward graduation. But its complex structure can be difficult to navigate. This presentation will demystify DARS data by providing an overview of its core components, explaining how the different levels of DARS data are represented in the data warehouse, and highlighting the key tables used for analyses.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Chris Smith
This presentation will cover what data is available to you for tracking student enrollment for your unit. This overview will cover Analytics reports, AUDB tables, and power query files that are available for you to use.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Adam Dahl
How I use git to version control my Alteryx workflows and outputs to reliably track changes
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
11:10 a.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Amy Lewis
Modern data platforms must do more than support reporting—they must power operational applications, advanced analytics, self-service, and AI. This session explores the evolution from traditional data warehouses to data lakes and modern lakehouse architectures, comparing their strengths, trade-offs, and ideal use cases.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Jennifer Hornsby
Whether you're new to Student Profile data or it's been a while since you've explored it, this session revisits the foundational student records data used across ASU reporting. Learn how commonly requested fields—including New/Returning/Continuing, major, campus, enrollment status, academic level, GPA, and primary record flags—are defined and used. (This session covers the Student Profile tables in the Data Warehouse, PeopleSoft, and ODS—not the Student Profile displayed in Salesforce.)
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Phil Arcuria
Not every transfer leaves a clear trail. This session explores how LLMs can help uncover transfer institutions when traditional data sources fall short. See how AI-assisted data cleansing and inferences can improve transfer tracking, support research, and expand institutional knowledge.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Andrew Lukosus
Are you constantly filtering, sorting, recalculating, comparing, reformatting, and visualizing spreadsheets like a Jawa juggling stolen circuit boards in a sandcrawler?
Have you tried using ChatGPT to perform your tasks as if it were a Jedi Master, only to end up with results as inaccurate as a malfunctioning astromech and as inconsistent as Lando Calrissian?
Fear not, young padawan! Learn to use The Force of ChatGPT like it's your own well-oiled protocol droid, generating Python code more reliable than a clone army to automate your data processing well beyond “I have a bad feeling about this” moments and faster than a landspeeder on Tatooine, all without having to go into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.
But wait, there’s more! We’ll also explore how LLMs can wield JavaScript to bring your data to life, creating interactive HTML pages that shine brighter than a lightsaber in the dark of a Dagobah night, with code generated faster than a YT-1300 Corellian light freighter with advanced hyperdrive navigation exploiting gravity wells to complete the Kessel Run is less than 12 parsecs (give or take a few hallucinated wrong turns).
Whether you’re filtering spreadsheets and pivoting reports like a Rebel analyst examining Death Star blueprints, or sorting data like a Sith lord organizing their collection of robes, this session will show you why deterministic code is still AI's father — because LLMs, bless their circuits, still can’t manage the necessary precision without a little help.
May the automation be with you!
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Jen Bevins
This year, Watts College embarked on a deep analysis of the demographics for our student body and built a dashboard to meet the many reporting needs of users from our college. We will be presenting on the development process, challenges and wins as well as next steps for the project.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
12:00 Lunch
1:10 p.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Sam Briggs
Whether you are new to the Institutional Analysis Dashboards or looking to make better use of these resources, this session offers a practical introduction to the dashboards available through Institutional Analysis. Participants will receive a guided tour, explore key features, and see how the dashboards can be used to answer common institutional questions. Attendees will leave with the knowledge and confidence to navigate the dashboards and support their work.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Liz Harrington
Some of Action Lab's most effective strategies are also its simplest. Learn how templated scopes of work, standardized reports, and executive summary slides help manage changing requirements, preserve context, and communicate insights beyond dashboards. We'll demonstrate these approaches through a product analytics case study, showing how Action Lab develops analytics in BigQuery and Looker Studio for evolving products.
Great For: Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Phil Arcuria
"Life moves pretty fast." So do students' enrollment decisions. This session uses data to explore the factors that influence re-enrollment, identify students at risk of stopping out, and faciliate a discussion on which factors are most actionable.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Matt Clements
A look at the process of taking a user from manually running Hyperion Studio reports and importing them into excel, to utilizing alteryx to produce these same outputs in an automated report that is saved for auditing purposes.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Jason Bradshaw
Past models relied on static, manual spreadsheets built months in advance. This session explores integrating admissions, progression, and historical data to create accurate, responsive forecasts. Learn how to use dashboards and cross-functional collaboration to adjust course capacity in real time, proactively aligning instructional staffing with evolving student demand. We will also discuss new AI-driven methods using real-time predictive analytics to dynamically optimize course offerings.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
2:10 p.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Mike Lavarias
How to start a data project and gather requirements
Great For: Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Liz Harrington
As analytics and research roles continue to evolve, job titles don't always explain the work behind them. Whether you're the only data professional in your organization or part of a multidisciplinary group, learn how Action Lab defines emerging roles like the Learning Scientist, communicates expertise to stakeholders, and facilitates a discussion on how others are navigating the same challenge.
Great For: Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Tyler Thompson
What resources are students using, which groups show higher or lower utilization, and how does usage change throughout the term? Join us for a walkthrough of the first iteration of a Student Resource Utilization dashboard.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers, Data Architects
Room:
Presented By: Todd Petersen
Most teams celebrate a launch and move on. This session offers a repeatable framework for post-launch analysis: defining the right questions before pulling numbers, reconciling multiple data sources, and separating what the system did from what users experienced. You'll leave with a 30/60/90/annual review cadence and a method for naming what's broken without losing stakeholder confidence. For analysts and PMs who want post-launch reviews to drive decisions, not just document what happened.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers, Data Architects
Room:
Presented By: Michael Wilson
In this session, we will explore data work related to students who have stopped out of their enrollment at ASU. Sometimes referred to as "future returners," topics include how many of these students there are, what data points are relevant to the conversation, what characteristics do they possess, and what are some initiatives and structures in place to help them return to ASU.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Dani Albasha
TBD - Overview of ASU's data ecosystem / data onboarding. Overview of databases, BI desktop/BI tools, reports/dashboard publication, Analytics Portal, OpenMetadata, access requests, slack channels, and other data community resources. (maybe touch on governance too?)
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
2:40 p.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Emile Eich
Developing meaningful dashboards begins long before visualization. This session shares lessons learned from building 2 decision-support dashboards for Tribal Nations across the US, which tracks legislation and Tribal broadband funding and projects. Attendees will explore the challenges of integrating complex public datasets, standardizing inconsistent data, collaborating with stakeholders, and creating reusable data assets that support multiple analytical and decision-making needs.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Lilian Gong
Using ASU student-term data (2008–2024), this study examined how English grades, as a proxy for English proficiency, and cultural-national identity relate to entry-level college math outcomes with mixed-effects linear regression modeling. Complementary Interviews with Chinese, Indian, and American students were conducted to further investigate cultural and national factors shaping math achievement.
Great For: Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Samantha Selby
Sense of belonging has been identified as being important for student persistence. This session will provide an overview of Belonging@ASU from survey development to institutionalization and how to find and use data being collected centrally at ASU.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Alecia Radatz
Most data professionals spend as much time working with people as they do working with data. This session explores practical techniques for navigating stakeholder relationships, asking better questions, managing expectations, and building trust throughout the life of a project. This session will share practical examples of what works, what doesn't, and how to navigate the messy parts of stakeholder relationships.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers, Data Architects
Room:
Presented By: Jennifer Hornsby
Take a behind-the-scenes tour of the student record lifecycle—from term activation through graduation and everything in between. Learn how key events such as discontinuation, enrollment, and degree conferral create and update the records that power student services and reporting.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Josh Johnson
An introduction to the different AI coding assistant options available to data professionals at ASU.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
3:15 p.m. End of Day 1
November 18, 2026
8:30 a.m. Welcome
9:00 a.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Jennifer Hornsby
No DeLorean required! Take a trip back to the data and rediscover the enrollment and student records data available through Registrar Technology Services. Whether you're new to these resources or haven't explored them in a while, you'll learn what data is available, how it can answer common business questions, and where to find documentation, training, and support.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Lucas Kauffman
This presentation is centered around the NLBI bot created by ET's Data & Analysis core, focusing on victories and challenges faced throughout the team's different iterations of creating an AI product from scratch.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers, Data Architects
Room:
Presented By: Collin Engelson
ASU currently has over 1.3 M square feet of research space across all its campuses and continues to add to this through frequent construction projects. With costs around labs continuing to grow, effective management of this complex space portfolio is no simple task. We plan to present how KE Research Facilities is developing Tableau dashboards for evaluating space and researcher productivity to help support its mission of getting highest and best use out of lab spaces.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Diana Ayala
How the Persistence Predictions from Actionable Analytics are defined, built, and used at ASU.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Margeaux Ciraolo
Every day, faculty and staff make decisions about how to collect, use, share, store, and protect institutional data. This interactive session introduces practical decision frameworks, governance tools, and campus resources that help participants confidently navigate common data questions without needing to become privacy or data governance experts. Using real ASU examples, this session will explore how thoughtful governance supports data discovery, responsible data use, transparency, and institutional trust throughout the data life cycle, ultimately leading to improved student success.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
10:00 a.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Jen Bevins
Members of CDUG and other data users from the colleges to meet and talk through challenges, wins and best practices.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Mellisa Soucy
How do graduate non-degree students transition into degree-seeking programs? This session demonstrates an interactive analytics portal that tracks student pathways from non-degree enrollment through graduate applications and program progression. Participants will discover how integrated institutional data can inform recruitment strategies, enrollment management, and graduate program planning.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Trent Koch
Every university identity has a life story; Created, authenticated, granted access, and occasionally broken. This session follows that story through real workflows: how PeopleSoft stops duplicate identities before they're born, how OpenSearch catches Kerberos and MFA issues before users notice, and how a custom S.Now-to-Jira automation untangles duplicates that slip through. Anonymized, real examples for what actually happens when 100+ new identities hit our systems every day.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts, Data Developers, Data Architects
Room:
Presented By: Liz Barbee
This presentation provides an overview of the data and reporting available for Mogli, ASU's new enterprise Salesforce SMS messaging tool. Attendees will learn how to access and interpret Mogli data, explore the reports available in Salesforce, and understand key metrics used to measure messaging activity and engagement.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
Room:
Presented By: Hannah Andrews
Student outreach is a pervasive part of how institutions support student success, yet it is often unknown how well such efforts are working. This presentation provides an overview of how evaluation was used to iterate on University College's Proactive Outreach Campaigns design.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
11:00 a.m. Breakout Sessions
Room:
Presented By: Josh Johnson
The annual update on what is now available from our enterprise data warehouse enrichment team and what is coming up over the next year.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Amy Lewis
Modern lakehouses have transformed data platforms, but they don't provide consistent business meaning. As AI and natural language analytics become mainstream, a semantic layer delivers the trusted business context, metrics, and governance needed for reliable insights. Learn how semantic layers complement lakehouse architectures to enable trusted analytics and AI.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Kellee Gunderson
Class reserve data can be difficult to interpret without understanding how and why reserves are created. When data analysts partner with class schedulers they gain insight into query data. Join us for an exploration of class reserves from both perspectives and see an example of how cross-team collaboration improved our reserve reporting.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Mellisa Soucy
Graduate student success depends on timely, accurate data. This session showcases interactive Tableau dashboards that transform institutional data into actionable insights on graduate retention and graduation. Attendees will learn how integrated data supports strategic planning, student success, and executive decision-making while providing the foundation for an ongoing predictive analytics initiative focused on graduate student persistence.
Great For: Data Analysts, Data Developers
Room:
Presented By: Alecia Radatz
Project SUN UP is broadening its focus to include graduation rates and degrees awarded alongside persistence and retention while evolving how ASU partners with colleges around student success. Explore the role of the Project SUN UP Orchestration Team, discover new student success resources, and join a conversation about how shared data can inform action and strengthen collaboration across ASU.
Great For: Data Consumers, Data Analysts
11:50 p.m. Lunch & Sliced!
Back by popular demand, the 2026 Data Conference will host another Sliced! competition. Come cheer on your fellow data enthusiasts as they create data viz magic and compete for the coveted Sliced! championship!
2:00 p.m. End of Day 2
Which data persona are you?
Data Consumer
A Data Citizen is a capable user of data as a product. The consumer’s focus is on analyzing the output of various datasets and reports rather than creating data content. Often tasked with answering questions or substantiating facts or assumptions by colleagues or leadership, a Data Consumer does not write code or use a BI Desktop, preferring to consume data in flat files, or pre-built reports that can be filtered and downloaded. Using data may be only a small part of this person’s role.
Look for Data Consumer for sessions that align with this level.
Data Analyst
The Data Analyst is a consumer of existing reports to perform analysis and derive insights. They may modify existing reports or perform basic ad hoc queries based on pre-built logic. A Data Analyst may use a BI Desktop for some functions, like using a visual query tool, or may simply leverage existing assets. While skilled, data wrangling is usually not the analyst’s primary job.
Look for Data Analyst for sessions that align with this level.
Data Developer
The Data Developer is a fearless creator of content across multiple platforms and methodologies. Adept at writing queries, creating tables, and scheduling jobs to refresh them. A developer will readily create reporting and visualizations to serve their department or the broader data community.
Look for Data Developer for sessions that align with this level.
Data Architect
The Data Architect is an academic at the core. While this data magician may have a great understanding of many different tools, is most renowned for skill in data science, statistics, and modeling. Experienced with and capable of using multiple platforms and software, the Data Architect typically uses them to derive inferences and analyses rather than producing data products or apps.
Look for Data Architect for sessions that align with this level.
Check out the Exhale Room!
Conferences can be highly-stimulating, fast-paced, and mentally demanding; a designated sensory room offers a calm, comfortable space for attendees to step into and away from all the stimuli. In recognition of the diverse needs within our community, this new space is designed as a calming, inclusive environment where individuals can pause, decompress, and recharge.
A sensory room isn't just a place to sit, it is an intentionally curated environment. It features carefully selected visuals. textures, sounds, and lighting designed to help regulate sensory input. Whether someone needs a moment of quiet, a break from social stimulation, or a comforting sensory experience, this space will offer supportive tools to promote calm, focus, and emotional balance.
This is part of ASU's Enterprise Technology's ongoing commitment to creating more inclusive, accessible, and human centered experiences for every member of our community.
Parking on Campus
The ASU Memorial Union is located at 301 E Orange St. (noted by the star) in Tempe on campus.
We highly encourage using alternative transportation such as carpooling, a golf cart, ride sharing or stretching your legs for a quick walk. With school in session, the parking lots will be very full, making alternate transportation an ideal choice.
Parking validations will not be provided, participants are responsible for paying for their parking.
- We encourage alternative travel such as walking, carpooling or using an ASU golf cart to attend our events.
- Promote bringing your reusable water bottles to reduce single use cup usage.
- Our team only uses evergreen signage and decor which is reused each year.
- Our events work with Zero Waste & Aramark on Think Before You Throw waste awareness.
Request attendees leave lanyards behind to be reused for future events.
