The event welcomed about 600 participants and experts in the areas addressed at the conference. The scientific programme included 34 papers published in the journals Machine Learning and Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and 131 papers published in three issues of LNCS Springer. For the first time, the ECMLPKDD included an Industrial Track with the publication of papers in the conference proceedings. The programme also included nine plenary sessions with invited speakers, ten tutorials, 12 workshops, two Discovery Challenges, and one PhD session.

The event featured speakers from academia, industry and R&D, from institutions such as the University of Leuven (Belgium), University of Washington, Stanford University, Washington State University (USA) and University of Pisa (Italy), and the companies Baidu Big Data Lab, Netflix, Microsoft Research (USA), Huawei Technologies (China).

The themes addressed reveal the current trends used for extracting knowledge from data. Mathematical and statistical fundamentals, deep-learning, parallel and distributed computing to analyse large volumes of data, social network analysis, meta-learning and algorithm selection, natural language processing, advanced analysis and learning in temporal data, integration of data analysis in renewable energies, or machine learning in life sciences, were some of the themes addressed during the five-day conference.The 2015 edition also included the Summer School on Data Sciences for Big Data, which took place at the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto (FCUP). This Summer School was specifically designed for MSc and PhD students, and the goal was to pass on knowledge on innovative data mining techniques using limited computer resources. About 110 researchers participated in the school, organised in collaboration with the University of Dortmund, Germany.

The INESC TEC researchers responsible for organising the ECML PKDD, the most important event in Europe in the areas of machine learning and data mining, are the following: João Gama, Alípio Jorge, Rita Ribeiro, Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, Carlos Ferreira, João Mendes Moreira, Luís Torgo, Pavel Brazdil, Ricardo Campos, Márcia Oliveira (all from LIAAD), Vítor Santos Costa, João Rodrigues, Sylwia Bugla (researchers at INESC TEC’s Centre for Research in Advanced Computing Systems, CRACS), Jaime Cardoso (Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia, CTM), and Carlos Soares (Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering, CESE).

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partners institutions: UP, UP-FCUP, UP-FEUP, UP-FEP, ISEP-IPP and INESC TEC.

INESC TEC, September 2015