5th Meetup - Reinforcement Learning and Dashboards

We are very pleased to announce our next meetup, which will be the last of 2018. This has been a fantastic year for us; since starting in the Spring, we have had some great talks and have now got over 500 members, which is better than we ever expected.

This event will take place at Tramshed Tech (http://www.tramshedtech.co.uk/) on Tuesday 11th December, kindly sponsored by AMPLYFI (https://www.amplyfigroup.com/) who are providing us with the venue together with food and refreshments. And of course, we are offering free beer, soft drinks and pizza. As it's Christmas 🎄🎅 ☃️ we will also get the mince pies in!

The venue will open at 18:30 when drinks will be provided. The talks will then begin at 19:00 with a break in between for refreshments. After the event, we will be heading to a pub that is en route to Cardiff Central Station.

We can also hold a Lightning Talk session ⚡ if anyone would like to give a short presentation. This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who is new to presenting, and would like to talk in a welcoming environment. Please let us know if you are interested by filling out this short form: https://goo.gl/forms/uIu5hiCHkgnkTouA2

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Talk 1: Roman Kopšo: Intro to Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is a branch of machine learning that is growing in popularity. It is an example of a 'semi-supervised' algorithm, whereby the 'Agent' (computer/algorithm) learns to interpret inputs from stimuli and perform the necessary steps in order to maximise a 'reward' from the environment. A famous example of this that has been in the media in recent years is the AlphaGo algorithm by DeepMind, which successfully learned how to beat the human champion Ke Jie in 2017.

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Talk 2: Tim Vivian-Griffiths: Intro to creating dashboards with Dash

One common aspect of data science is the clear presentation of data and results.

The Dash library by Plotly (https://dash.plot.ly/) allows users to create interactive web interfaces for data presentation. Check out these beautiful example dashboards: https://medium.com/@plotlygraphs/7-new-dash-apps-made-by-the-dash-community-196998112ce3 Under the hood it makes use of Javascript, React, and the Flask web-microserver in Python. But all of the coding can be carried out in pure Python. It is very similar to the Shiny library in R (https://shiny.rstudio.com/).

The material in this session will be relevant for anyone who wishes to learn about different ways to provide interactive data presentations in all fields, from academic research to business intelligence (BI) practices.

Learning this has been a recent activity for me, so all of the concepts will be explained in an introductory fashion, and all of the material will be posted onto our GitHub account (https://github.com/pydatacardiff) ahead of the meetup.

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Lightning Talk ⚡by Heather Turner

We are delighted to have this talk by Heather, who works towards promoting diversity within the software community in Cardiff and beyond. Heather is chair of the R Forwards task force on women and other under-represented groups (https://forwards.github.io/), and also a leader of R-Ladies Remote (https://twitter.com/rladiesremote?lang=en). In this talk, Heather will be talking about her work, and the recent Datathon at the Transgender Day of Remembrance (https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/), which occurred on the 20th of November.

In order to provide a comfortable and welcoming event for all, the evening will be covered by the official PyData Code of Conduct: https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct.html