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The Data Roundabout: Experiences with Generative AI 📍 Hosted by Crosstide 🗓 Thursday 18th September 📍 66-67 Sun Ct, Cornhill, London EC3V 3NB ⏰ Doors from 6pm, Talks kick off at 6.30

Data Roundabout is our meetup for people working with data and AI – a space for practical inspiration, unvarnished lessons, and conversation that cuts through the hype. This edition: Generative AI in real life – where it’s working, where it’s not, and how to avoid the trap of using tomorrow’s tools to do yesterday’s work.

🎤 Talks on the night:

Steven Thompson Technical Director @ Crosstide "Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" The way we build for the web has changed beyond recognition. Vibe coding promises speed and creativity, but it also magnifies risk. It can make great engineers fantastic, good engineers better, and poor engineers far worse. The real question is how leaders make sure it amplifies the right things.

Robert Hardman Chief AI and Digital Transformation Officer @ Inchcape plc "AI is about reimagining the future, not automating the past" Paradigm shifts bring promise—and pitfalls. Robert shares real-world examples of what “new” means in business transformation, the traps companies fall into, and how to successfully bring GenAI into the C-suite without pouring money down the drain.

Sasha Bilton CTO @ Planday "Hidden Treasures: DIY GenAI to Clear Years of Backlog" Meet Clarence, a Swedish VP of Sales who wiped out hundreds of low-value backlog stories and cut onboarding costs by 20%—armed with GenAI, a prompt, and a killer 80s soundtrack. Sasha will share how they did it safely, how it changed the relationship between sales and engineering, and how it’s sparked a culture of useful AI automation across Planday.

The Data Roundabout: Experiences with Generative AI 📍 Hosted by Crosstide 🗓 Thursday 18th September 📍 66-67 Sun Ct, Cornhill, London EC3V 3NB ⏰ Doors from 6pm, Talks kick off at 6.30

Data Roundabout is our meetup for people working with data and AI – a space for practical inspiration, unvarnished lessons, and conversation that cuts through the hype. This edition: Generative AI in real life – where it’s working, where it’s not, and how to avoid the trap of using tomorrow’s tools to do yesterday’s work.

🎤 Talks on the night: Steven Thompson Technical Director @ Crosstide "Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" The way we build for the web has changed beyond recognition. Vibe coding promises speed and creativity, but it also magnifies risk. It can make great engineers fantastic, good engineers better, and poor engineers far worse. The real question is how leaders make sure it amplifies the right things.

Robert Hardman Chief AI and Digital Transformation Officer @ Inchcape plc "AI is about reimagining the future, not automating the past" Paradigm shifts bring promise—and pitfalls. Robert shares real-world examples of what “new” means in business transformation, the traps companies fall into, and how to successfully bring GenAI into the C-suite without pouring money down the drain.

Sasha Bilton CTO @ Planday "Hidden Treasures: DIY GenAI to Clear Years of Backlog" Meet Clarence, a Swedish VP of Sales who wiped out hundreds of low-value backlog stories and cut onboarding costs by 20%—armed with GenAI, a prompt, and a killer 80s soundtrack. Sasha will share how they did it safely, how it changed the relationship between sales and engineering, and how it’s sparked a culture of useful AI automation across Planday.

Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify and former co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude), joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss the evolution from data quality to decision quality. Patrick shares his experience building data contracts solutions at Atlassian and later developing analytics tracking tools. Patrick challenges the assumption that AI will eliminate the need for structured data. He argues that while LLMs excel at understanding unstructured data, businesses still need deterministic systems for automation and decision-making. Patrick shares insights on why enforcing data quality at the source remains critical, even in an AI-first world, and explains his shift from analytics to CRM while maintaining focus on customer data unification and business impact over technical perfectionism.Tune in!

Join us for an engaging talk on transforming data stories through effective text management, color usage, and dynamic content.

Data Visualization Expert Cara Thompson will provide valuable insights and practical coding tips to enhance your data visualizations in R. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your data storytelling skills!

There are often many facets to our data stories, which we need to present succinctly enough for our readers to want to engage with.

In this talk, we will explore how to make text work for us, by first considering how much of it we really need.

Once we've decluttered and explored how we can use colours to be less text-dependent, we'll look at how to optimise text hierarchy in descriptions and in-plot annotations to keep the main thing the main thing, and how to create dynamic content and alignments.

Finally, we'll explore coding tricks to apply these typography tips to tables and interactive plots, giving readers additional information on demand.

Throughout the talk, Cara will share the packages and code snippets used to create and modify plots in R straight from readily available data.

🎉 The London Scala User Group is back in action! 🎉 Come along to another round of London Scala Talks! This month, we'll be hearing from Dragana Milovancevic and Jamie Thompson. We look forward to seeing you! ———————————————————— *Agenda* 6:00pm - 🍻 Doors open. Come along and grab a drink! 6:30pm - 🗣️ Dragana Milovancevic: Autograder for Functional Programming and Beyond 7:10pm - 🍕 Intermission: Join us for some free food and drinks! Vegetarian and gluten free options are provided. Let us know if you'd like something special - we'd be happy to accommodate. 7:45pm - 🗣️ Jamie Thompson: How does Incremental Compilation Work with Scala 3, Can we Improve it? ———————————————————— 🗣️ Dragana Milovancevic: Autograder for Functional Programming and Beyond With the ever-growing numbers of students in programming courses, autograding has become a necessity. In this talk, I will present our work on automated grading of Scala programming assignments. Our approach takes as input student submissions and reference solutions, and uses equivalence checking to automatically prove or disprove correctness of each submission. We achieve robustness by handling recursion using functional induction and by handling auxiliary functions using function call matching. We achieve scalability using a clustering algorithm that leverages the transitivity of equivalence to discover intermediate reference solutions among student submissions. We implement our approach on top of the Stainless verifier, to support equivalence checking of Scala programs. We illustrate the underlying techniques on example Scala exercises throughout the talk. *Dragana Milovancevic* Dragana Milovančević is a PhD student in the LARA group at EPFL, under the supervision of Prof. Viktor Kunčak, and an Academic Collaborator at Birkbeck, University of London. Previously, she received her master's degree from the University of Belgrade, where she was working as a teaching assistant. Her research interests are in the field of formal verification, where she applies equivalence checking to a variety of domains, including automated grading. ———————————————————— 🗣️ Jamie Thompson: How does Incremental Compilation Work with Scala 3, Can we Improve it? Scala 3 uses the same incremental compiler as Scala 2, but it needs to support all the new features of Scala 3, how does this work? How can you use it to improve build times and you will also find out what opportunities there are to improve the performance benefits further with Scala 3. Incremental compilation is a way to improve the build times of Scala projects. It has potential to be improved further with cooperation from the user to better organise their projects. We will find out how it works in principle, the changes in scala 3 and the steps we can take to improve it further (edit: e.g. with pipelining). *Jamie Thompson* Jamie is a compiler hacker at the Scala Center, working on everything from the newcomers experience to all things TASTy. I have interests in making software design more fun and approachable; and reducing barriers to learning. In my spare time I like to read, listen to music, play games, go on hikes. ———————————————————— 🌐 Can't make it in person? We'll be streamed online from 6PM at https://thetradedesk.zoom.us/j/92415657377?pwd=WE1DMlJRdERtNEt2VzRwREhkdGo5Zz09 Passcode: 308964 ———————————————————— 🙌 Thanks to our partners: ScalaJobs: https://scalajobs.com/ VirtusLab: https://virtuslab.com/ ———————————————————— 🗣️ Would you like to present, but are not sure how to start? Give a talk with us and you'll receive mentorship from a trained toastmaster! Get in touch and we'll get you started: https://forms.gle/zv5i9eeto1BsnSwe8 🏡 Interested in hosting or supporting us? Please get in touch: https://forms.gle/3SX3Bm6zHqVodBaMA ———————————————————— 📜 All London Scala User Group events operate under the Scala Community Code of Conduct: https://www.scala-lang.org/conduct/ We encourage each of you to report the breach of the conduct, either anonymously or by contacting one of our team members. We guarantee privacy and confidentiality, as well as that we will take your report seriously and react quickly. https://forms.gle/9PMMorUWgBnbk1mm6

It's time for the October meetup of the Swedish Power BI User Group! It is another online Teams meeting, and this time we are boasting not only one but two speakers. The first is Will Thompson, a product manager at Microsoft, currently owning the Fabric Data Activator product (which is still in private preview). This tool promises to give amazing capabilities to Power BI, and few people have more insight and experience of this product than Will. Here is some of the information available around it (it has been fairly hush-hush so far): https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/driving-actions-from-your-data-with-data-activator/

Then we will be treated to a look at Aimplan, a tool for handling amazingly easy to use writeback and forecasting in Power BI. Who better to show us the ropes than Erik Lidman, one of the creators behind the product. He wants to show the product and get ideas and feedback for future development, and I'm sure this community will be happy to provide!

We're starting at 1900 hours sharp as we're not trying to get people through the door, so the timeline looks like this:

1900-1915 - intro and setting the stage 1915-2015(-ish) - Will Thompson and Data Activator 2015-2045-ish - Erik Lidman and Aimplan

See you there!

Data science and analytics teams are unique. Large and small corporations want to build and manage analytics teams to convert their data and analytic assets into revenue and competitive advantage, but many are failing before they make their first hire. In this session, the audience will learn how to structure, hire, manage and grow an analytics team. Organizational structure, project and program portfolios, neurodiversity, developing talent, and more will be discussed.

Questions and discussion will be encouraged and engaged in. The audience will leave with a deeper understanding of how to succeed in turning data and analytics into tangible results.

Talk by: John Thompson

Here’s more to explore: State of Data + AI Report: https://dbricks.co/44i2HBp The Data Team's Guide to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform: https://dbricks.co/46nuDpI

Connect with us: Website: https://databricks.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/databricks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/databricks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/databricksinc Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/databricksinc

In "Building Analytics Teams," author John K. Thompson draws from over three decades of experience in analytics and management to guide you through creating an impactful analytics team. The book emphasizes key strategies for hiring, managing, and leading analytics experts to drive business improvements and achieve organizational success. What this Book will help me do Develop the skills to build and lead high-performing analytics and AI teams. Gain insights into selecting impactful projects that drive measurable business outcomes. Understand how to cultivate successful collaborations with cross-functional business teams. Learn techniques to effectively communicate analytics-driven strategies to executives. Master strategies to navigate organizational and technological challenges in data initiatives. Author(s) John K. Thompson is a seasoned analytics and AI practitioner with over 30 years of experience leading data-driven transformations for dynamic organizations. Renowned for his strategic and pragmatic approach, John crafts hands-on methodologies to unlock the potential of analytics teams. His passion for mentoring fuels his engaging and insightful writing style. Who is it for? This book is ideal for senior executives and managers aiming to harness analytics and AI to transform their organizations. It's also tailored for analytics professionals who want to elevate their team's operational success. No matter your current experience, you'll find strategies to optimize your analytics initiatives and deliver impactful results.

Send us a text This week, host Al Martin goes deep with Madhu Kochar and Hemanth Manda, two leaders of product development from the IBM Data and AI team. They discuss the future foundations of digital business -- in particular, the coming age of multicloud and how organizations will contend with data and workloads on cloud systems that span geographies, vendors, and diverse rules for governance. The conversation turns to the need for a data platform that can foster AI initiatives across these diverse environments.

Shownotes:

00:00 - Check us out on YouTube and SoundCloud.  00:10 - Connect with Producer Steve Moore on LinkedIn & Twitter.  00:15 - Connect with Producer Liam Seston on LinkedIn & Twitter.  00:20 - Connect with Producer Rachit Sharma on LinkedIn.  00:25 - Connect with Host Al Martin on LinkedIn & Twitter.  00:40 - Connect with Hemanth Manda on LinkedIn. 00:45 - Connect with Madhu Kochar on LinkedIn.

05:48 – What is Multicloud? 11:38 – Dig into ICP for Data. 18:30 - Learn more about Open API. 32:55 - Check out Stratechery By Ben Thompson.

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

The multi-armed bandit problem is named with reference to slot machines (one armed bandits). Given the chance to play from a pool of slot machines, all with unknown payout frequencies, how can you maximize your reward? If you knew in advance which machine was best, you would play exclusively that machine. Any strategy less than this will, on average, earn less payout, and the difference can be called the "regret". You can try each slot machine to learn about it, which we refer to as exploration. When you've spent enough time to be convinced you've identified the best machine, you can then double down and exploit that knowledge. But how do you best balance exploration and exploitation to minimize the regret of your play? This mini-episode explores a few examples including restaurant selection and A/B testing to discuss the nature of this problem. In the end we touch briefly on Thompson sampling as a solution.