talk-data.com

Venue: Carnival House, 100 Harbour Parade, Southampton, SO15 1ST 📢 Want to speak 📢: submit your talk proposal

Main Talks 1️⃣ Searching for Shady Patterns: Shining a light on UK corporate ownership - Adam Hill In June 2016 the UK government launched the world’s first “beneficial ownership” register; a requirement for all UK companies to register who were the “persons of significant control”, PSCs, who actually controlled the company. Recent investigative journalism has made headlines with the leaking of the Panama and Paradise papers and it is clear that transparency in corporate ownership needs to be a significant factor within modern democracy. In a partnership between DataKind UK and Global Witness we have built the worlds first network graph mapping all of the UK public data on those who control corporate interests in the UK; it comprises in excess of 4.5 million companies and 4 million individual people. It has been enriched with company officer data and metrics of financial secrecy based upon geographic regions.

The goal of the project was to enable Global Witness to search for "shady patterns" within corporate ownership networks to act as leads for investigative journalism to expose corrupt practices. Further more, we were able to analyse the completeness of the register and identify ways of improving such data structures to inform other world governments how to best build similar public registers of corporate ownership.

We present here how we built this amazing data structure using Python tools for cleaning and data processing and a Neo4j graph database storing the network graph itself. In addition, we share the first insights derived from this process.

2️⃣ Breaking the Black Box - How to Evaluate Your Agents... in Real Time Too! - Craig West If you are building with LLMs, creating high quality evaluations is one of the most impactful things you can do. Without evals, it can be very difficult and time intensive to understand how different model versions might affect your use case. This talk aims to provide you a roadmap that may be simpler than you think to implement.

In this talk, we will look at the two aspects of Observability and Evaluation. Using the manual evaluating-ai-agents.com, along with its code repo, we will see that observability can be done without vendor solutions but with standard Python, either during Evaluation Driven Development or after development.

We will look at three core evaluation strategies - deterministic, human and LLM as Judge - with code examples.

Lightning Talks ⚡ ⚡1️⃣ TBA ⚡2️⃣ TBA

Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. You MUST use your initial/first name and surname on your meetup profile, otherwise, you will NOT make it on the guest list! 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No further confirmation required. You will NOT need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in. If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know so we can assign your place to someone on the waiting list.

*** Code of Conduct: This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct. *** There will be pizza & drinks, generously provided by our host, Carnival UK. ***

Logistics Doors open at 6.30 pm, talks start at 7 pm. For those who wish to continue networking and chatting we will move to a nearby pub/bar for drinks from 9 pm.

Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatasoton (https://twitter.com/pydatasoton) for updates and early announcements. We are also on Instagram/Threads as @pydatasoton, and find us on LinkedIn.

Happy New Year!

The first meet-up of 2024 will be a drinks-only meeting, how's that for a start? We were kindly reserved a space from the organizers at the drink reception of the first day at the Festival of Genomics & Biodata 2024! Look for us in the Genome Dome.

We strongly encourage you to register for the festival, by clicking on this link. Registration is free for PhDs, employees of NHS, Pharma and several other organizations. For others, the organisers of FoG have kindly offered free tickets to members of Bioinformatics London, as long as you're not in sales or marketing. When booking, select the In-Person End User Ticket and drop us a line so we can alert FoG.

The Festival of Genomics & Biodata 2024 is an amazing opportunity to network with companies, vendors, academics and high-profile scientists (speakers this year include J. Craig Venter, Dame Sue Hill, Ewan Birney and many others)! There are also opportunities for career development, workshops and testing your scientific talk skills. More info on the website. You will feel you deserve your drinks at the end of day one!

We hope to see many of you there! Note that the festival and the reserved room will be at the ExCeL, London (click for directions)! We are meeting at the Genome Dome. The time for start may alter slightly due to the festival schedule. If there's demand, we may also adjourn to the Fox pub outside afterwards.

Drinks reception starts at 17:40.