Bricks is an open-source content library for natural language processing, which provides the building blocks to quickly and easily enrich, transform or analyze text data for machine learning projects. For many Pythonistas, contributing to an open-source project seems scary and intimidating. In this tutorial, we offer a hands-on experience in which programmers and data scientists learn how to code their own building blocks and share their creations with the community with ease.

Running machine learning models in a production environment brings its own challenges. In this talk we would like to present our solution of a machine learning lifecycle for the text-based cataloging classification system from idealo.de. We will share lessons learned and talk about our experiences during the lifecycle migration from a hosted cluster to a cloud solution within the last 3 years. In addition, we will outline how we embedded our ML components as part of the overall idealo.de processing architecture.

This talk presents a novel approach to MLOps that combines the benefits of open-source technologies with the power and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing platforms. By using tools such as Terraform, MLflow, and Feast, we demonstrate how to build a scalable and maintainable ML system on the cloud that is accessible to ML Engineers and Data Scientists. Our approach leverages cloud managed services for the entire ML lifecycle, reducing the complexity and overhead of maintenance and eliminating the vendor lock-in and additional costs associated with managed MLOps SaaS services. This innovative approach to MLOps allows organizations to take full advantage of the potential of machine learning while minimizing cost and complexity.

Typing is at the center of „modern Python“, and tools (mypy, beartype) and libraries (FastAPI, SQLModel, Pydantic, DocArray) based on it are slowly eating the Python world.

This talks explores the benefits of Python type hints, and shows how they are infiltrating the next big domain: Machine Learning

A modern AI start-up is a front-end developer plus a prompt engineer" is a popular joke on Twitter. This talk is about LangChain, a Python open-source tool for prompt engineering. You can use it with completely open-source language models or ChatGPT. I will show you how to create a prompt and get an answer from LLM. As an example application, I will show a demo of an intelligent agent using web search and generating Python code to answer questions about this conference.

We present an open source library to shrink pickled scikit-learn and lightgbm models. We will provide insights of how pickling ML models work and how to improve the disk representation. With this approach, we can reduce the deployment size of machine learning applications up to 6x.

By taking neural networks back to the school bench and teaching them some elements of geometry and topology we can build algorithms that can reason about the shape of data. Surprisingly these methods can be useful not only for computer vision – to model input data such as images or point clouds through global, robust properties – but in a wide range of applications, such as evaluating and improving the learning of embeddings, or the distribution of samples originating from generative models. This is the promise of the emerging field of Topological Data Analysis (TDA) which we will introduce and review recent works at its intersection with machine learning. TDA can be seen as being part of the increasingly popular movement of Geometric Deep Learning which encourages us to go beyond seeing data only as vectors in Euclidean spaces and instead consider machine learning algorithms that encode other geometric priors. In the past couple of years TDA has started to take a step out of the academic bubble, to a large extent thanks to powerful Python libraries written as extensions to scikit-learn or PyTorch.

Is your model prejudicial? Is your model deviating from the predictions it ought to have made? Has your model misunderstood the concept? In the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the word "fairness" is particularly common. It is described as having the quality of being impartial or fair. Fairness in ML is essential for contemporary businesses. It helps build consumer confidence and demonstrates to customers that their issues are important. Additionally, it aids in ensuring adherence to guidelines established by authorities. So guaranteeing that the idea of responsible AI is upheld. In this talk, let's explore how certain sensitive features are influencing the model and introducing bias into it. We'll also look at how we can make it better.

In this talk, we will explore the role of a machine learning enabler engineer in facilitating the development and deployment of machine learning models. We will discuss best practices for optimizing infrastructure and tools to streamline the machine learning workflow, reduce time to deployment, and enable data scientists to extract insights and value from data more efficiently. We will also examine case studies and examples of successful machine learning enabler engineering projects and share practical tips and insights for anyone interested in this field.

FastKafka is a Python library that makes it easy to connect to Apache Kafka queues and send and receive messages. In this talk, we will introduce the library and its features for working with Kafka queues in Python. We will discuss the motivations for creating the library, how it compares to other Kafka client libraries, and how to use its decorators to define functions for consuming and producing messages. We will also demonstrate how to use these functions to build a simple application that sends and receives messages from the queue. This talk will be of interest to Python developers looking for an easy-to-use solution for working with Kafka.

The documentation of the library can be found here: https://fastkafka.airt.ai/

I will present the challenges we encountered while migrating an ML model from batch to real-time predictions and how we handled them. In particular, I will focus on the design decisions and open-source tools we built to test the code, data and models as part of the CI/CD pipeline and enable us to ship fast with confidence.

Everybody knows our yellow vans, trucks and planes around the world. But do you know how data drives our business and how we leverage algorithms and technology in our core operations? We will share some “behind the scenes” insights on Deutsche Post DHL Group’s journey towards a Data-Driven Company. • Large-Scale Use Cases: Challenging and high impact Use Cases in all major areas of logistics, including Computer Vision and NLP • Fancy Algorithms: Deep-Neural Networks, TSP Solvers and the standard toolkit of a Data Scientist • Modern Tooling: Cloud Platforms, Kubernetes , Kubeflow, Auto ML • No rusty working mode: small, self-organized, agile project teams, combining state of the art Machine Learning with MLOps best practices • A young, motivated and international team – German skills are only “nice to have” But we have more to offer than slides filled with buzzwords. We will demonstrate our passion for our work, deep dive into our largest use cases that impact your everyday life and share our approach for a timeseries forecasting library - combining data science, software engineering and technology for efficient and easy to maintain machine learning projects..

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are the backbone for managing large volumes of data efficiently and thus play a central role in business and science today. For providing high performance, many of the most complex DBMS components such as query optimizers or schedulers involve solving non-trivial problems. To tackle such problems, very recent work has outlined a new direction of so-called learned DBMSs where core parts of DBMSs are being replaced by machine learning (ML) models which has shown to provide significant performance benefits. However, a major drawback of the current approaches to enabling learned DBMS components is that they not only cause very high overhead for training an ML model to replace a DBMS component but that the overhead occurs repeatedly which renders these approaches far from practical. Hence, in this talk, I present my vision of Learned DBMS Components 2.0 to tackle these issues. First, I will introduce data-driven learning where the idea is to learn the data distribution over a complex relational schema. In contrast to workload-driven learning, no large workload has to be executed on the database to gather training data. While data-driven learning has many applications such as cardinality estimation or approximate query processing, many DBMS tasks such as physical cost estimation cannot be supported. I thus propose a second technique called zero-shot learning which is a general paradigm for learned DBMS components. Here, the idea is to train model

Debugging is hard. Distributed debugging is hell.

Dask is a popular library for parallel and distributed computing in Python. Dask is commonly used in data science, actual science, data engineering, and machine learning to distribute workloads onto clusters of many hundreds of workers with ease.

However, when things go wrong life can become difficult due to all of the moving parts. These parts include your code, other PyData libraries like NumPy/pandas, the machines you’re running on, the network between them, storage, the cloud, and of course issues with Dask itself. It can be difficult to understand what is going on, especially when things seem slower than they should be or fail unexpectedly. Observability is the key to sanity and success.

In this talk, we describe the tools Dask offers to help you observe your distributed cluster, analyze performance, and monitor your cluster to react to unexpected changes quickly. We will dive into distributed logging, automated metrics, event-based monitoring, and root-causing problems with diagnostic tooling. Throughout the talk, we will leverage real-world use cases to show how these tools help to identify and solve problems for large-scale users in the wild.

This talk should be particularly insightful for Dask users, but the approaches to observing distributed systems should be relevant to anyone operating at scale in production.

PyScript brings the full PyData stack in the browser, opening up to unprecedented use cases for interactive data-intensive applications. In this scenario, the web browser becomes a ubiquitous computing platform, operating within a (nearly) zero-installation & server-less environment.

In this talk, we will explore how to create full-fledged interactive front-end machine learning applications using PyScript. We will dive into the the main features of the PyScript platform (e.g. built-in Javascript integration and local modules ), discussing new data & design patterns (e.g. loading heterogeneous data in the browser), required to adapt and to overcome the limitations imposed by the new operating environment (i.e. the browser).

Chatbots are fun to use, ranging from simple chit-chat (“How are you today?”) to more sophisticated use cases like shopping assistants, or the diagnosis of technical or medical problems. Despite their mostly simple user interaction, chatbots must combine various complex NLP concepts to deliver convincing, intelligent, or even witty results.

With the advancing development of machine learning models and the availability of open source frameworks and libraries, chatbots are becoming more powerful every day and at the same time easier to implement. Yet, depending on the concrete use case, the implementation must be approached in specific ways. In the design process of chatbots it is crucial to define the language processing tasks thoroughly and to choose from a variety of techniques wisely.

In this talk, we will look together at common concepts and techniques in modern chatbot implementation as well as practical experiences from an E-mobility bot that was developed using the Rasa framework.

Large generative models rely upon massive data sets that are collected automatically. For example, GPT-3 was trained with data from “Common Crawl” and “Web Text”, among other sources. As the saying goes — bigger isn’t always better. While powerful, these data sets (and the models that they create) often come at a cost, bringing their “internet-scale biases” along with their “internet-trained models.” While powerful, these models beg the question — is unsupervised learning the best future for machine learning?

ML researchers have developed new model-tuning techniques to address the known biases within existing models and improve their performance (as measured by response preference, truthfulness, toxicity, and result generalization). All of this at a fraction of the initial training cost. In this talk, we will explore these techniques, known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), and how open-source machine learning tools like PyTorch and Label Studio can be used to tune off-the-shelf models using direct human feedback.

As the number of production machine learning use-cases increase, we find ourselves facing new and bigger challenges where more is at stake. Because of this, it's critical to identify the key areas to focus our efforts, so we can ensure our machine learning pipelines are reliable and scalable. In this talk we dive into the state of production machine learning in the Python Ecosystem, and we will cover the concepts that make production machine learning so challenging, as well as some of the recommended tools available to tackle these challenges.

This talk will cover key principles, patterns and frameworks around the open source frameworks powering single or multiple phases of the end-to-end ML lifecycle, incluing model training, deploying, monitoring, etc. We will be covering a high level overview of the production ML ecosystem and dive into best practices that have been abstracted from production use-cases of machine learning operations at scale, as well as how to leverage tools to that will allow us to deploy, explain, secure, monitor and scale production machine learning systems.

The title “Data Scientist” has been in use for 15 years now. We have been attending PyData conferences for over 10 years as well. The hype around data science and AI seems higher than ever before. But How are we managing?

The detection of outliers or anomalous data patterns is one of the most prominent machine learning use cases in industrial applications. I present a Bayesian histogram anomaly detector (BHAD), where the number of bins is treated as an additional unknown model parameter with an assigned prior distribution. BHAD scales linearly with the sample size and enables a straightforward explanation of individual scores, which makes it very suitable for industrial applications when model interpretability is crucial. I study the predictive performance of the proposed BHAD algorithm with various SoA anomaly detection approaches using simulated data and also using popular benchmark datasets for outlier detection. The reported results indicate that BHAD has very competitive predictive accuracy compared to other more complex and computationally more expensive algorithms, while being explainable and fast.

As machine learning becomes more prevalent across nearly every business and industry, making sure that these technologies are working and delivering quality is critical. In her talk, Alicia will discuss the importance of machine learning observability and why it should be a fundamental tool of modern machine learning architectures. Not only does it ensure models are accurate, but it helps teams iterate and improve models quicker. Alicia will dive into how Shopify has been prototyping building observability into different parts of its machine learning platform. This talk will provide insights on how to track model performance, how to catch any unexpected or erroneous behaviour, what types of behavior to look for in your data (e.g. drift, quality metrics) and in your model/predictions, and how observability could work with large language models and Chat AIs.

In this talk, we will introduce the audience to DoWhy, a library for causal machine-learning (ML). We will introduce typical problems where causal ML can be applied and will specifically do a deep dive on root cause analysis using DoWhy. To do this, we will lay out what typical problem spaces for causal ML look like, what kind of problems we're trying to solve, and then show how to use DoWhy's API to solve these problems. Expect to see a lot of code with a hands-on example. We will close this session by zooming out a bit and also talk about the PyWhy organization governing DoWhy.

In this talk, we will report on our experiences switching from Pandas to Polars in a real-world ML project. Polars is a new high-performance dataframe library for Python based on Apache Arrow and written in Rust. We will compare the performance of polars with the popular pandas library, and show how polars can provide significant speed improvements for data manipulation and analysis tasks. We will also discuss the unique features of polars, such as its ability to handle large datasets that do not fit into memory, and how it feels in practice to make the switch from Pandas. This talk is aimed at data scientists, analysts, and anyone interested in fast and efficient data processing in Python.

We have recently open-sourced a pure-Python implementation of Cyclic Boosting, a family of general-purpose, supervised machine learning algorithms. Its predictions are fully explainable on individual sample level, and yet Cyclic Boosting can deliver highly accurate and robust models. For this, it requires little hyperparameter tuning and minimal data pre-processing (including support for missing information and categorical variables of high cardinality), making it an ideal off-the-shelf method for structured, heterogeneous data sets. Furthermore, it is computationally inexpensive and fast, allowing for rapid improvement iterations. The modeling process, especially the infamous but unavoidable feature engineering, is facilitated by automatic creation of an extensive set of visualizations for data dependencies and training results. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the inner workings of Cyclic Boosting, along with a few sample use cases, and demonstrate the usage of the new Python library.

You can find Cyclic Boosting on GitHub: https://github.com/Blue-Yonder-OSS/cyclic-boosting

Proper monitoring of machine learning models in production is essential to avoid performance issues. Setting up monitoring can be easy for a single model, but it often becomes challenging at scale or when you face alert fatigue based on many metrics and dashboards.

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of test-based ML monitoring. I will explore how to prioritize metrics based on risks and model use cases, integrate checks in the prediction pipeline and standardize them across similar models and model lifecycle. I will also take an in-depth look at batch model monitoring architecture and the use of open-source tools for setup and analysis.