PhillyPUG March 2012 Meetup - Pandas

Hi All,

Our March meeting will be held at Buchanan, Ingersoll, and Rooney (the same place as RedSnake). Our food sponsor will be Chariot Solutions. Many thanks to both companies!

The agenda is as follows:

6:30 PM - 7:00 PM - Food, networking, a word from our sponsors.

7:00 PM - 7:20 PM - OpenCV by Jim Snavely

7:25 PM - 8:25 PM - What is Pandas and Where is it Going? by Wes McKinney

8:30 PM - 8:45 PM - Lightning Talks

8:45 PM - Leave for Ladder15

More details:

Our PyStar talk this month will explore the basics of Computer Vision. Jim Snavely will give a quick introduction to image processing using Python and OpenCV. He'll show some basic noise reduction methods and simple feature detection. OpenCV is a huge and wonderful library that can do many amazing things. This will just scratch the surface, but enough, I hope, to pique your curiosity.

Jim Snavely lives in Philadelphia and writes software for the web and mobile devices. He's really into machine vision, machine learning, and functional programming.

Wes McKinney will deliver our featured talk this month. The talk is called "What is Pandas and Where is it Going?" Pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with relational or labeled data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real-world data analysis in Python. In this talk, Wes will give an introduction to the library, discuss its current state, and near-term future directions.

Wes McKinney is Co-Founder and CTO of Lambda Foundry, a company dedicated to building the next generation of high-productivity and high-performance tools for Finance. From 2010 to 2012, he served as a financial Python consultant while leading pandas development. From 2007 to 2010, he researched global macro and credit trading strategies at AQR Capital Management. He graduated from MIT with an S.B. in Mathematics. He is on leave from the Duke University Ph.D program in Statistics.

Line up your babysitters now, because our March meeting is going to be a good one! See you all soon. For those that are going, enjoy PyCon.

All the best,

Tom.