Django forms as a data management and ETL tool for R&D

This month, we'll have a talk from Aaron Wiegel about using Django forms as a data management and ETL tool. There's also a lightning talk from Manu Suryavansh about data augmentation in NLP.

LIGHTNING TALK
Manu will discuss his recent blog post about data augmentation for NLP: https://towardsdatascience.com/nlp-data-augmentation-using-transformers-89a44a993bab.

SPEAKER BIO: Manu Suryavansh

Manu Suryavansh is a Data Scientist working in the area of Natural language processing. He previously worked on design of analog circuits for sensors and memory before changing careers to data science 3 years ago. He writes about NLP and Edge AI at https://msuryavanshi.medium.com.

MAIN TALK: DJANGO FORMS AS A DATA MANAGEMENT AND ETL TOOL

As even a relatively small R&D-oriented organization grows, the need to aggregate data from multiple experiments becomes key to generating new insights to advance that growth. However, the data from these experiments is often scattered across multiple spreadsheets with different formats, and the tracking of metadata necessary for aggregation can be very poor. Creating a simple web application using Django forms enables this process by both allowing users to track experimental conditions and other associated metadata and to validate measurements taken within those spreadsheets. Furthermore, such an application can generate standardized spreadsheets to unify data collection efforts. Using even a relatively simple set of forms can provide a basis for a minimal viable product to start the process of aggregation and bridge the gap between siloed experimental spreadsheets and a more useful and user-friendly data warehouse solution.

SPEAKER BIO: Aaron Wiegel

Aaron Wiegel, PhD is a data engineer at Pivot Bio, a biotech start up that provides genetically engineered bacteria to fix nitrogen for corn as a replacement for synthetic fertilizer. He previously did research in experimental physical and atmospheric chemistry before changing careers to data science 5 years ago.

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