PWL #01 :: Hello Porto!

Hello everyone!

We are delighted to tell you that we are kicking off the first Papers We Love @ Porto. Our goal is to help bridge the gap between Porto industry and academics: membership of both types are very welcome; and to dive deep into interesting programming topics.

For the first ever Papers We Love in Portugal, we'll be hosting Alvaro Videla (https://twitter.com/old_sound), Co-Author of the book "RabbitMQ in Action" and Former RabbitMQ Core Developer and José Marcelino (https://www.linkedin.com/in/josemarcelino1), Data Scientist at Farfetch.

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> Harmful GOTOs, Premature Optimizations and Programming Myths are The Root of All Evil

Over the years our industry has accumulated folklore that shapes what we are as an industry. We repeat maxims like "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil" but perhaps ignoring the context on which that sentence was said. This ignorance has lead us to creating myths that sometimes do more harm than good.

In this talk I will review some of those myths, see their origin and at the same time make a historical review of what was going on in our industry in the '70s, when those myths appeared.

As the old saying goes: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

> Talk objectives:

• Promote a culture of reading more books, academic papers and related material that refers to the history of our field and programming in general.

> Talk audience:

• From beginners to experts. No special knowledge is required to attend the talk.

Bio

Alvaro Videla used to work as a Core Developer for RabbitMQ and co-authored the book "RabbitMQ in Action" for Manning Publishing. Before moving to Europe, Alvaro worked in Shanghai building one of Germany's largest dating websites. Some of his open source projects can be found here: http://github.com/videlalvaro. Besides code related stuff he likes traveling with his wife, listening/playing music and reading books.

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> All Aboard the Natural Language Processing Train

From the depts of intuition to practice, José Marcelino will guide us throw the valley of Natural Language Processing field.

Sequence labeling tasks, such as Part-of-Speech Tagging or Named Entity Recognition, represents a crucial step to understand language. Step by step, we will review Xuezhe Ma and Eduard Hovy approach (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.01354.pdf) to address the problem. We will examine each decision and explain how can we mount a similar solution in a practical approach.

Bio

José Marcelino is a Data Scientist at Farfetch while completing his Master Thesis in Natural Language Processing at the University of Coimbra.

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Details

Doors will open around 18:30 and presentations will start after a quick introduction of the meetup, around 19:00.

After each presentation, we will open up the floor for discussion, questions and drinks!

Hope to see you soon!

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Remember that we strictly adhere to the Code of Conduct (https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) set forth by all PWL charters.

If you want to present a paper either in a full or lightning-talk format, feel free to reach @ordepdev or submit the CFP form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OfwO8XlESmka1uWB_HczuCjsy__o8ORdqEEKBmGXQxA).

Make sure that you join us on Slack through https://pwlporto.slack.com/ or https://pwlporto.herokuapp.com/ and follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/pwlporto).