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 @genekogan’s great talk on AI & the visual arts at @pydatalondon @annabellerol
Each year we try some new ideas – this year we tried:
- 4 hour Hackathon on NLP to help our keynote speakers from FullFact to try new ideas
- “Making your first open source submission” session to help 30 people step closer to contributing to open source (thanks Katy and Nick for leading that session!)
- A scavenger hunt
- A crazy pub-quiz (James Powell is responsible for blowing quite a few minds) on Saturday evening
- A longer-running Slack channel
- New co-chair Ruby and review committee lead Linda
- More financial support for speakers and attendees to increase diversity
- Several unconference slots (filled by volunteers on the day) spoke on Bayesian statistics and other topics
- Our first Women @ PyData reception just before the conference started
- More book signing
- Fast video turnaround into YouTube
- A drone giveaway (by sponsor [and my business partner] Endava)
pros: Great selection of talks for all levels and pub quiz cons: on a weekend, pub quiz (was hard). Overall would recommend 9/10 @harpal_sahota
We’re very thankful to all our sponsors for their financial support and to all our speakers for donating their time to share their knowledge. Personally I say a big thank-you to Ruby (co-chair) and Linda (review committee lead) – I resigned both of these roles this year after 3 years and I’m very happy to have been replaced so effectively (ahem – Linda – you really have shown how much better the review committee could be run!). Ruby joined Emlyn as co-chair for the conference, I took a back-seat on both roles and supported where I could. Our volunteer team great again – thanks Agata for pulling this together.
I believe we had 20% female attendees – up from 15% or so last year. Here’s a write-up from Srjdan and another from FullFact (and one from Vincent as chair at PyDataAmsterdam earlier this year) – thanks!
#PyDataLdn thank you for organising a great conference. My first one & hope to attend more. Will recommend it to my fellow humanists! @1208DL
For this year I’ve been collaborating with two colleagues – Dr Gusztav Belteki and Giles Weaver – to automate the analysis of baby ventilator data with the NHS. I was very happy to have the 3 of us present to speak on our progress, we’ve been using RandomForests to segment time-series breath data to (mostly) correctly identify the start of baby breaths on 100Hz single-channel air-flow data. This is the precursor step to starting our automated summarisation of a baby’s breathing quality.
Slides here and video below:
This updates our talk at the January PyDataLondon meetup. This collaboration came about after I heard of Dr. Belteki’s talk at PyConUK last year, whilst I was there to introduce RandomForests to Python engineers. You’re most welcome to come and join our monthly meetup if you’d like.
Many thanks to all of our sponsors again including Bloomberg for the excellent hosting and Continuum for backing the series from the start and NumFOCUS for bringing things together behind the scenes (and for supporting lots of open source projects – that’s where the money we raise goes to!).
There are plenty of other PyData and related conferences and meetups listed on the PyData website – if you’re interested in data then you really should get along. If you don’t yet contribute back to open source (and really – you should!) then do consider getting involved as a local volunteer. These events only work because of the volunteered effort of the core organising committees and extra hands (especially new members to the community) are very welcome indeed.
I’ll also note – if you’re in London or the south-east of the UK and you want to get a job in data science you should join my data scientist jobs email list, a set of companies who attended the conference have added their jobs for the next posting. Around 600 people are on this list and around 7 jobs are posted out every 2 weeks. Your email is always kept private.
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.