StartupChile – we have our contracts, StrongSteam progress, PyCon

A few days back we signed our StartupChile contracts, now we’re official. Apparently our ID cards are available but there’s no word on bank accounts yet. The admin rolls forward but it is a bit boring now. The feeling here is still very positive, we’ve gained some Return Value Agenda (RVA) points by meeting with the local university and StrongSteam runs its first event this week (next post).

In StrongSteam we’ve made progress – we’re now working with Kasabi on an optical character recognition project on Latin plant labels, they have large plant data sets which we’ll marry up with a user’s experience whilst walking around places like Kew Gardens. We’re being interviewed by the BBC on this shortly.

Behind the scenes I’ve extended the python-tesseract wrapper with a nicer access class, shortly I’ll post that to github. It makes it really easy to get characters and co-ordinates from scenes. Image processing tools will be available via StrongSteam to make the task easier.

For March I’ve also bought my PyCon tickets to run my High Performance Computing class. I had no idea it’d take longer to fly from Santiago to Santa Clara than Heathrow to Santiago! It is 20 hours north vs 18 hours west.


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.