We all love to tell stories with data and we all love to listen to them. Wouldn't it be great if we could also draw actionable insights from these nice stories?

As scikit-learn maintainers, we would love to use PyPI download stats and other proxy metrics (website analytics, github repository statistics, etc ...) to help inform some of our decisions like: - how do we increase user awareness of best practices (please use Pipeline and cross-validation)? - how do we advertise our recent improvements (use HistGradientBoosting rather than GradientBoosting, TunedThresholdClassifier, PCA and a few other models can run on GPU) ? - do users care more about new features from recent releases or consolidation of what already exists? - how long should we support older versions of Python, numpy or scipy ?

In this talk we will highlight a number of lessons learned while trying to understand the complex reality behind these seemingly simple metrics.

Telling nice stories is not always hard, trying to grasp the reality behind these metrics is often tricky.

Behind every technical leap in scientific Python lies a human ecosystem of volunteers, companies, and institutions working in tension and collaboration. This keynote explores how innovation actually happens in open source, through the lens of recent and ongoing initiatives that aim to move the needle on performance and usability - from the ideas that went into NumPy 2.0 and its relatively smooth rollout to the ongoing efforts to leverage the performance GPUs offer without sacrificing maintainability and usability.

Takeaways for the audience: Whether you’re an ML engineer tired of debugging GPU-CPU inconsistencies, a researcher pushing Python to its limits, or an open-source maintainer seeking sustainable funding, this keynote will equip you with both practical solutions and a clear vision of where scientific Python is headed next.

The array API standard is unifying the ecosystem of Python array computing, facilitating greater interoperability between code written for different array libraries, including NumPy, CuPy, PyTorch, JAX, and Dask.

But what are all of these "array-api-" libraries for? How can you use these libraries to 'future-proof' your libraries, and provide support for GPU and distributed arrays to your users? Find out in this talk, where I'll guide you through every corner of the array API standard ecosystem, explaining how SciPy and scikit-learn are using all of these tools to adopt the standard. I'll also be sharing progress updates from the past year, to give you a clear picture of where we are now, and what the future holds.