Early last year Chris and I founded ModelInsight, a boutique Python-focused Data Science agency in London. We’ve grown well, I figure some reflection is in order. In addition the Data Science scene has grown very well in London, I’ll put some notes on that down below too.
Through consulting, training, workshops and coaching we’ve had the pleasure of working with the likes of King.com, Intel, YouGov and ElevateDirect. Each project aimed to help our client identify and use their data more effectively to generate more business. Projects have included machine learning, natural language processing, prediction, data extraction for both prototyping and deploying live services.
I’ve particularly enjoyed the training and coaching. We’ve run courses introducing data science with Python, covering stats and scikit-learn and high performance Python (based on my book), if you want to be notified of future courses then please join our training announce list.
With the coaching I’ve had the pleasure of working with two data scientists who needed to deploy reliably-working classifiers faster, to automate several human-driven processes for scale. I’ve really enjoyed the challenges they’re posing. If your team could do with some coaching (on-site or off-site) then get in touch, we have room for one more coaching engagement.
I’ve also launched my first data-cleaning service at Annotate.io, it aims to save you time during the early data-cleaning part of a new project. I’d value your feedback and you can join an announce list if you’d like to follow the new services we have planned that’ll make data-cleaning easier.
All the above occurs because the Data Science scene here in London has grown tremendously in the last couple of years. I co-organise the PyDataLondon meetup (over 1,400 members in a year!), here’s a chart showing our month-on-month growth. At Christmas it turned up a notch and it just keeps growing:
Each month we have 150-200 people in the room for strong Data Science talks, in a couple of months we’ll have our second conference with 300 people at Bloomberg (CfP announce list). We’re actively seeking speakers – join that list if you’d like to know when the CfP opens.
I’ve been privileged to speak as the opening keynoter on The Real Unsolved Problems in Data Science last year at PyConIreland, I’ve just spoken on data cleaning at PyDataParis and soon I’ll keynote on Data Science Deployed at PyConSE. I’m deeply grateful to the community for letting me share my experience. My goal is to help more companies utilise their data to improve their business, if you’ve got ideas on how we could help then I’d love to hear from you!
I’m also thinking of writing a book on Building Python Data Science Products, see the link for some notes, it’ll cover 15 years of hard-won advice in building and shipping successful data science products using Python.
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.
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