Category Archives: Conference

My first PyCon

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I have recently come back from my first ever Python Conference (PyCon), and in fact, my first ever generalistic development conference. This was quite a new experience as I am used to either academic (e.g., ECIR) or data-centric (e.g., Strata) conferences. PyConUK was quite different in many ways to the events I am used to, and I could not be happier I have attended it. The main reason is that Marco Bonzanini and myself had a workshop on Natural Language Processing in Python during the conference, but I also saw this as a great opportunity to get involved in a community that I have never been close to, despite the fact that I have coded in Python (intermittently) for several years.

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NewsIR 2016

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After a long organisation process (explained in my last blogpost), the workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR) finally took place during the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) a couple of weeks ago in Italy.

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NewsIR 2016 (Behind the scenes)

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About a week ago I attended the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). The conference was great and I will write a blogpost about it soon. However, the main focus of this article is one specific workshop within that conference: the Recent Trend in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR). The reason why I want to talk about it is because I was the lead organiser and the event ended up being a success much bigger than we could have predicted. This blogpost will explain how the workshop idea was born and how the workshop was organised. We thought it is worth sharing this knowledge hoping that other people can get some insight out of it. A latter blogpost will focus on the content of the workshop itself.

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February PyData Meet-up

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I have attended PyData once again the London PyData meet-up and I am as happy as I was the first time. The day started with some news from the organisers who listed some interesting discoveries within the python ecosystem:

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PyData meetup

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It has been ages since I wrote my last post and I think my first PyData meet-up is the perfect event to catch-up with it. PyData (London) is the biggest group for both Python and Data Science in London with more than 2,300 registered members.

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Strata + Hadoop (Second day)

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The second (and last) day of the conference started with presentations from two massive companies: Philip Radley shown how BT is relying on Hadoop to achieve a lot of increase in value for their clients; and Rod Smith (from IBM) defended the position that digital innovation is nowadays driven by real time insights. He claimed that realtime is becoming a critical cornerstone and summarised the three types of data analysis process we have seen in the last years:

  • Traditional: Time spent moving data around rather than analysing it.
  • Big Data: Driven by contextual data, more time analysing than driving actionable insights.
  • Rapid insights: Just in time quick approximations of solutions.

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Strata + Hadoop (First day)

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Strata+Hadoop World is one of the main conferences in the world for Big Data technologies and I was lucky enough to attend it last week. Even if this is my second Strata I couldn’t but be amazed at the scale of the conference, with 7 parallel sessions from topics ranging from data science to the future of Hadoop.

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