meetups

Come and have fun with local useRs at SatRday LA on April 6, 2019. This is the first SatRday in LA, and the second in the states. If you have not heard of SatRday, it is a one-day affordable, inclusive, non-profit R conference organized by local R users.

Update_1: Slides for the 4 talks added below (at each talk section separately). Update_2: Photos from the meetup and a short description of the event added below (at the bottom of the post). Update_3: Video recording of the meetup here:

Update: Video recording of the meetup here: ▶ Machine Learning in Production with Szilard Pafka Slides here:

Update: Slides click here. Video recording here: This video is no longer available on YouTube (original link). Stream processing with R in AWS by Gergely Daróczi Abstract: R is rarely mentioned among the big data tools, although it’s fairly well scalable for most data science problems and ETL tasks. This talk presents an open-source R package to interact with Amazon Kinesis via the MultiLangDaemon bundled with the Amazon KCL to start multiple R sessions on a machine or cluster of nodes to process data from theoretically any number of Kinesis shards. Besides the technical background and a quick introduction on how Kinesis works, this talk will feature some stream processing use-cases at CARD.com, and will also provide an overview and hands-on demos on the related data infrastructure built on the top of Docker, Amazon ECS, ECR, KMS, Redshift and a bunch of third-party APIs.

Update: Slides here: Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/szilard/machine-learning-meetup-febr-2017 Our next meetup: No-Bullshit Data Science by Szilard Pafka Abstract: While extracting business value from data has been performed by practitioners for decades, the last several years have seen an unprecedented amount of hype in this field. This hype has created not only unrealistic expectations in results, but also glamour in the usage of the newest tools assumably capable of extraordinary feats. In this talk I will apply the much needed methods of critical thinking and quantitative measurements (that data scientists are supposed to use daily in solving problems for their companies) to assess the capabilities of the most widely used software tools for data science. I will discuss in details two such analyses, one concerning the size of datasets used for analytics and the other one regarding the performance of machine learning software used for supervised learning.

UPDATE: The meetup “sold out” in record time (35 minutes!) from announcing it on our mailing list. There are more than 250 people on the waiting list now. Machine Learning at Google # Come and hear about a range of the work that is being done in Google’s Los Angeles office in the area of machine learning:

It has been over 2 months since the first satRday conference ended and I shared some quick impressions on that, where I also promised a follow-up post on my experiences as ending up being the main organizer of the event – this is what you are reading now. Although the idea was born at the EARL Boston conference last year, and I decided to take part in the project while living in Los Angeles – the conference took place in Budapest after all as logistics seemed to be easier there thanks to my closer relationship to the Hungarian R User Group.

Deep Learning @Whisper talk by Nick Stucky-Mack Video now available, thank you to community member Carl Mullins for providing video services: ▶ Deep Learning @Whisper THU, MAY 12 AT 6 00 PM, VENICE, CA In this talk we will discuss how Whisper uses machine learning for natural language processing tasks. We will focus on how Whisper applies deep learning to moderate content created by its more than 20 million monthly active users. The talk will explore the problem of short text classification, and will cover Whisper’s choices in machine learning models, software development, and hardware.

What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models? Anthony Goldbloom, founder and CEO of Kaggle UPDATE:Video recording of the talk available here Kaggle is a community of almost 450K data scientists who have built almost 2MM machine learning models to participate in our competitions. Data scientists come to Kaggle to learn, collaborate and develop the state of the art in machine learning. This talk will cover some of the lessons on winning techniques we have learned from the Kaggle community.

Join PyDSLA for a talk by Erin LeDell Intro to Machine Learning with H2O and Python Get your tickets HERE Summary: This workshop will provide an overview of how to use H2O, the scalable open source machine learning library, from Python. The core algorithms of H2O are implemented in Java, however, fully-featured APIs are available in R, Python, Scala, and also through a web interface. The focus of this hands-on workshop will be the “h2o” Python module.

Tickets available HERE Talk: Jihoon Son Presents - Introduction to Apache Tajo: Future of Data Warehouse Abstract: Apache Tajo is a data warehouse system for Web-scale data. It provides virtual integration of a multitude of diverse data sources, thereby facilitating easy and rapid data integration which has been regarded as an essential, but heavy step in business intelligence. In addition, it has a fault-tolerable distributed query engine for accelerating query speed. With the “query federation” and “distributed processing” capacities, Tajo is capable of providing users with reliable and efficient analysis of Web-scale data spread on multiple sources. I will introduce Apache Tajo including its overall architecture, current state and challenges, and discuss advantages what Tajo can bring to users. In addition, I will give a brief demo of Tajo.

The LA Data Warehouse, Business Analytics and Analytics meetup had a fantastic first event with a great audience (full house), an awesome host (thanks Edmunds: Punnoose for taking the lead and the Team onsite and helping) and a great mix of 3 talks overviewing the field.

(Posting the slides and video recording from this event is long overdue - our apologies for the delay.) At the September LA Data Science/Machine Learning meetup we had IRIS.TV’s Chief Data Scientist Tom Sullivan and VP of Engineering Joel Spitalnik presenting. IRIS.TV is a video recommendation engine, and in their excellent talk Tom & Joel shared with us their approach to personalization and how they use machine learning to achieve their goals. They also shared the architecture of their systems, including how data is flowing between the various parts (i.e. the ETL pipeline). One thing that popped up as a question and I found interesting is that the usage of R and Python in their company is split 50-50. In fact, while Tom is using mainly R, Joel is using mainly Python. While this is perhaps unusual at a relatively small startup, our survey on software tools used for data science revealed that most data scientists in LA (at least those attending the meetups) are using R or Python, with a roughly equal split/small advantage for R. It just happens that for obvious reasons (such as network effects) that one tool dominates in most companies.

It pains me to admit it, but even though I had visited their site, created an account, and played around with their tools, I didn’t really get the value proposition behind Plot.ly. I already use ggplot, bokeh, and d3.js, I already use knitr and ipython notebooks, so why do I need a new way of posting my plots on a web page?

It was a whole bunch of intense fun photographing so many of you at our Los Angeles User Groups Holiday Party last week! (Only junkies and programmers would think “User” is a good name for a holiday party.) But we do throw a helluva party, and nearly 80 of you were photographed for head shots. You guys are awesome, and we all really enjoyed it!

Data Science @ Datapop: The Marketing Knowledge Graph presented by Dr. Ben Zamanzadeh, CTO at DataPop Today’s eCommerce has evolved into a complex multi-dimensional optimization problem. DataPop’s semantic technology and Marketing Knowledge Graph is used to generate Omni-Channel advertising campaigns. This presentation will review our technology stack, machine learning models, discuss what worked what did not work for us and do a live demo of Marketing Knowledge Graph.

At this meetup we’re fortunate to have RStudio’s lead developer Joe Cheng flying in from Seattle to talk about Shiny. Shiny makes it possible to develop interactive web applications by writing only a handful of R code. It lowers the barriers to constructing interactive dashboards that you can use to better explain your results to your boss and/or co-workers, or it can help you productionalize your analysis so that others in your company can make use of it regularly without the need to continually bother you.

Last week the LA R meetup featured another round of 5 speakers each highlighting a few things they had found interesting at the useR! 2014 conference. This was the second such event after the first one in September - probably because useR! was awesome enough that it inspired 10 volunteers to stand up on stage and talk more about it.

Last week, the Python Data Science LA meetup debuted with a fabulous event. It was already much anticipated, with more than 250 people showing interest (RSVP+waiting list), and a lucky 100 converged upon the hip Venice Arts venue to hear our speakers. Our sponsor OpenMail has also done a fantastic job in getting us this venue, bringing food+drinks and taking care of all the details. Thanks OpenMail Team!

This is a re-publication of a blog post from a blog I created not long before we got the idea to start DataScience.LA, and in many aspects it is the genesis of DSLA (the blog’s name, the people getting together - thanks Eduardo, Amelia and Leigh). It was also the spark that lead to the creation of the Python Data Science LA meetup.