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PyDataMCR February Talks

Starting off the year strong with talks hosted this month by Krakenflex.

THE TALKS

Symbolic Regression - Yash Yeola (he/him)

Ever wondered how to get ML models do maths? Yash will demystify symbolic regression, an evolutionary technique that discovers human-readable mathematical models from data.

What to expect in this talk: ✅ Explore the core principles behind symbolic regression. ✅ Build a symbolic regression algorithm from scratch — no black boxes here! ✅ Understand the latest trends in the space

Let’s decode the equations behind the data — one symbol at a time.

Yash is a data scientist with a strong background in Mathematics and Computing, which has been instrumental in his work across various sectors. He has developed interpretable models for public sector stakeholders, ensuring clarity and transparency while handling sensitive data with the utmost care. Currently, at Butterfly Data, his main focus is NLP projects and leveraging Generative AI to automate processes, enhancing efficiency and innovation within their operations.

Mind the Gap: Making Technical Concepts Click with Any Audience - Magdalena Rabczewska (She/Her)

Have you ever attended a presentation where you walked away more confused than when you arrived? Been in a meeting where the misinterpretation of a technical concept caused delays or frustration? Or maybe you would like to just learn more about how to communicate with both technical and business audiences? If so, this talk is for you.

Magdalena will share practical, actionable strategies for effectively presenting technical ideas to both technical and business audiences. Drawing from her experience working closely with senior leadership as well as technical teams, she will highlight the importance of tailoring your message, using relatable analogies, and anchoring complex ideas in ways that make them accessible and relevant.

You’ll leave with tangible tips on structuring your presentations, crafting impactful data stories, and ensuring your audience understands the "why" behind the tech. Whether you're speaking to C-suite executives or cross-functional teams, this talk will help you bridge the gap and make sure your technical concepts truly click.

Magdalena is a Senior BI Developer with a passion for data visualisation and creating dashboards that make complex information clear and accessible. Specialising in designing intuitive dashboards and building robust data models, she works to bridge the gap between technical and business needs, empowering data-driven decision-making and ensuring data is easily understood by a wide range of audiences.

LOCATION We'll be at Krakenflex, who are also kindly supplying catering. The capacity is limited to 90.

After the talks we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY Under 16s welcome with a responsible guardian. There is a quiet room available if needed. Toilets are accessible.

SPONSORS Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support Thank you to AutoTrader for sponsoring PyDataMCR. Thank you to Krakenflex for sponsoring PyDataMCR, as well as hosting this event!

PyDataMCR & RLadies Manchester are teaming up for a jointly hosted code night.

Have a data project or some coursework?

Want to get to know your peers?

Come to Code Night! A night to work on your own project, with supportive peers available for advice. Ask for tips from others more experienced than yourself, or teach somebody else something great!

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

A laptop

A project (optional!, feel free to join us for a chat or to provide others with advice).

HOW IT WILL WORK

Event Starts (18:30) - Come down and join us at the Bonded Warehouse for some food and drinks. You'll have an opportunity to share any problems you're working on with other attendees.

During Event - Put any questions or conversation topics you want to discuss to the PyData community, its likely someone will be interested and have an opinion!

Event Closes (20:00) - After the event we'll all head somewhere local for some post-event socialising.

EVENT GUIDELINES

PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY

The venue is wheelchair accessible, though please let us know in advance if this is needed.

If you have any dietary requirements please supply them when signing up to the event and we can make sure you feel welcome too!

Under 16s are welcome with a responsible guardian.

SPONSORS

Thank you to NUMFocus for supporting PyData and the wider open source ecosystem.

Thank you to Bonded Warehouse for generously hosting us in their offices.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

Don't have python or R?

Download Anaconda (https://anaconda.org/) OR Use Google Colab (https://colab.research.google.com/) OR Download R & RStudio (https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/)

Don't have a project?

You can always help others in the Slack Channel or in person.

Lightning Talks are an opportunity for members of the community to share a short talk with the wider community - with or without slides!

Introduction to Open-Source Science (OSSci) - Tim Bonnemann (he/him)

Open-Source Science (OSSci) is a new NumFOCUS initiative – launched in July 2022 in partnership with IBM – that aims to accelerate scientific research by improving the ways open source software in science gets done (built, used, funded, sustained, recognized, etc.). OSSci connects scientists, OSS developers and other stakeholders to share best practices, identify common pain points, and explore solutions together.

The five OSSci interest groups to date cover domain-specific topics (chemistry/materials, life sciences/healthcare, climate/sustainability) as well as cross-domain topics (reproducibility, map of science), with more to be rolled out in 2024. This lightning talk will provide a brief overview of OSSci’s activities to date, our plans for 2024, and how you can get involved.

Tim Bonnemann, Community Lead, Open-Source Science (OSSCi) at IBM Research

AutoXAI4Omics: Automated eXplainable AI for Omics - Anna Paola Carrieri (she/her)

AutoXAI4Omics (https://github.com/IBM/AutoXAI4Omics) is a command line automated explainable AI tool that easily enable healthcare and life sciences scientists (e.g., biologists, bioinformaticians, clinicians) to perform prediction tasks from omics data (e.g., gene expression; microbiome data; SNPs) and any tabular data (e.g., clinical data) using a range of machine learning methods. As an example a scientist may quickly an end-to-end ML analysis to predict disease type or status from genomics data without having to code or understand the deep technical details of the ML pipeline. A broad technical team from IBM Research has developed, tested and validated the tool for -Omics use cases over a number of years

Anna Paola Carrieri, Manager, Healthcare and Life Science team in IBM Research UK

The floor will then be opened up to other community lightning talks!

We'll be at BabNQ, the capacity is limited to 60.

EVENT GUIDELINES

PyDataMCR is a strictly professional event, as such professional behaviour is expected.

PyDataMCR is a chapter of PyData, an educational program of NumFOCUS and thus abides by the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct

https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html

Please take a moment to familiarise yourself with its contents.

ACCESSIBILITY

Under 16s welcome with a responsible guardian. There is a quiet room available if needed. The event space is downstairs.

SPONSORS

Thank you to NUMFocus for sponsoring Meetup and further support