Between 19th and 20th of October, group of our students from the Faculty of Informatics and Electronic Economy, benefactors of the apprenticeship program led by our Department of Information Systems participated in the international data analysis PyData conference.
Among the happy participants were:
- Dawid Bodych
- Filip Grzebalski
- Katarzyna Kabzińska
- Aleksandra Kasprzak
- Mateusz Orlikowski
- Joanna Sobkowiak
- Szymon Wieczorek
- Magdalena Wieloch
- Our PhD student MSc. Piotr Kałużny was supervising them on their trip.
PyData is an educational program led by the American non-profit organization NumFOCUS. Goal of the conference is to allow the users and creators of data analysis tools to share their ideas and discuss current trends. At present, the program organizes regular conferences in the United States and over a dozen of European countries. Topics that were being addressed in those meetings include advanced techniques of data processing, such as: machine learning, deep neural networks and distributed storage and processing of data. The conference focuses on a few main programming languages for completing those tasks, including – Python, R, Julia and Scala. This year, the first edition of PyData conference took place in Warsaw at the Copernicus Science Centre.
The conference program was broad and included many aspects of innovative data analysis methods. The presentations were divided on three difficulty levels:
- For beginners – introductions to the brought-up topics, tools and algorithms.
- For intermediate users – covering the complete descriptions and approaches to very specific topics like: Deep Learning or NLP.
- For advanced users – aiming to describe advanced topics connected with data analysis, focusing on newest achievements and research.
For students, and everyone else interested we recommend watching YouTube playlist shared by the organizers: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGVZCDnMOq0oe0eD-edj_2CuBIZ938bWT
Even though among the people presenting there were many participants from many Universities and research teams, most of the presenters and participants were specialists and practitioners with many years of experience in the field of data analysis – both from the business and scientific perspective. During the conference, we could attend the presentations from the employees of Google, McKinsey & Company, but also the developers that work on expanding Python infrastructure – example of that was the creator of the genism library. Due to that fact, despite the scientific characteristics of some presentations, the conference strongly presented the practical examples of shown methods and approaches, used in solving current business problems.
Due to the fact, that our students were able to attend the conference, they gained very valuable knowledge connected with their field of study, that may help them with their theses, and finding work in the future.