All posts of Ian

PyData Conference & AHL Hackathon

Our 5th annual PyDataLondon conference will run this April 27-29th, this year we grow from 330 to 500 attendees. As before this remains a volunteer-run conference (with support from the lovely core NumFOCUS team), just as the monthly meetup is a volunteer-run event. The Call for Proposals is open until the start of March (you have 2 weeks!) – first time speakers are […]

Python Data Science jobs list into 2018

I’ve been building my data-science jobs list for a couple of years now. Almost 800 folk are on the list, they receive an email update once every two weeks containing around seven job ads. Many active members of PyDataLondon are on the list. The ads are mostly London-based, a few spread into Europe. In addition […]

PyDataBudapest and “Machine Learning Libraries You’d Wish You’d Known About”

I’m back at BudapestBI and this year it has its first PyDataBudapest track. Budapest is fun! I’ve had a second iteration talking on a slightly updated “Machine Learning Libraries You’d Wish You’d Known About” (updated from PyDataCardiff two weeks back). When I was here to give an opening keynote talk two years back the conference […]

Kaggle’s Mercedes-Benz Greener Manufacturing

Kaggle are running a regression machine learning competition with Mercedes-Benz right now, it closes in a week and runs for about 6 weeks overall. I’ve managed to squeeze in 5 days to have a play (I managed about 10 days on the previous Quora competition). My goal this time was to focus on new tools […]

Kaggle’s Quora Question Pairs Competition

Kaggle‘s Quora Question Pairs competition has just closed, I’m pleased to say that with 10 days effort I ranked in the top 39th percentile (rank 1346 of 3396 in the private leaderboard). Having just run and spoken at PyDataLondon 2017, taught ML in Romania and worked on several client projects I only freed up time […]

PyDataLondon 2017 Conference write-up

Several weeks back we ran our 4th PyDataLondon (2017) conference – it was another smashing success! This builds on our previous 3 years of effort (2016, 2015, 2014) building both the conference and our over-subscribed monthly meetup. We’re grateful to our host Bloomberg for providing the lovely staff, venue and catering. Really got inspired by […]

Introduction to Random Forests for Machine Learning at the London Python Meetup

Last night I had the pleasure of returning to London Python to introduce Random Forests (this builds on my PyConUK 2016 talk from September). My goal was to give a pragmatic introduction to solving a binary classification problem (Kaggle’s Titanic) using scikit-learn. The talk (slides here) covers: Organising your data with Pandas Exploratory Data Visualisation […]

PyDataLondon 2017 Conference Call for Proposals Now Open

This year we’ll hold our 4th PyDataLondon conference during May 5th-7th at Bloomberg (thanks Bloomberg!). Our Call for Proposals is open and will run during February (closing date to be confirmed so don’t just forget about it! – get on with making a draft submission soon). We want talks at all levels (first timers especially […]

Practical ML for Engineers talk at #pyconuk last weekend

Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing Machine Learning for Engineers (a practical walk-through, no maths) [YouTube video] at PyConUK 2016. Each year the conference grows and maintains a lovely vibe, this year it was up to 600 people! My talk covered a practical guide to a 2 class classification challenge (Kaggle’s Titanic) with […]