Two assistant professors in the electrical and computer engineering department and affiliated with the Grainger Institute for Engineering each played pivotal roles in organizing conferences on the topic of machine learning. Dimitris Papailiopoulos was co-chair for the SysML Conference, a new meeting targeting research at the interface between systems and machine learning held February 15-16, 2018 in Stanford, California. Additionally, Po-Ling Loh co-chaired the Midwest Machine Learning Symposium, June 6-7, 2018 at the University of Chicago. Both conferences drew impressive rosters of invited speakers and submitted talks from researchers at all stages of their careers to discuss cutting-edge advances and opportunities for the future of data science.