25 May 2016 | by Piotr Migdał | 3 min read
Last week I attended PyData Berlin 2016. It was my first non-academic conference. I was not sure if it was going to be interesting or going beyond things I can see on the Internet anyway. But since I've never been to Berlin, had an open invitation by a friend of mine[^skander], and it's 6.5h by train[^trains] from Warsaw, I decided to go.
td;dr: It was worth my time and I really enjoyed the event.
Talks I have found the most interesting:
Katharina Rasch, What every Data Scientist should know about data anonymization
Łukasz Czarnecki, Brand recognition in real-life photos using deep learning
Maciej Gryka, Removing Soft Shadows with Hard Data (research paper)
Julia Evans, How to trick a neural network
Matthew Honnibal, Designing spaCy: A high-performance natural language processing (NLP) library written in Cython
Also, these were good:
And talks I missed, but I am sure were great:
If your beloved talk is not there, don't cry - most likely it was in a parallel session. (Also, in general topic selection and quality of presentation was good.)
I had a lightning talk: Teaching Machine Learning. I should write a blog post on it one day (especially on the 5-day data analysis summer school for sociology students and researchers, as now materials are in Polish). As for now, it is implicitly covered in Data science intro for math/phys background.
Thanks to the organizers!
[^skander]: Thanks Skander! [^trains]: I love traveling by train. And I spend my time in trains more productively than in the office. I work, read or sleep... efficiently. I guess it's mainly because of slow Internet connection, fixed time, and less opportunities for distraction. [^icps]: International Conference of Physics Students, not International Carnivorous Plant Society. Since ICPS is a very student event (a crazy conference party each night), I got scared. Fortunately, Martina Pugliese remembered me from giving A mathematical model of the Mafia game talk. It was in 2010 in Graz; for a moment of nostalgia, here are my photos.