Python on cloud GPUs; Science analysed with NLP

We are very pleased to announce that we will be having our next meetup on the 11th of February. This event will be held at Tramshed Tech (https://www.tramshedtech.co.uk/), kindly sponsored by AMPLYFI (https://amplyfi.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.

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 local Brew Dog pub that is close to Cardiff Central Station.

We are very fortunate to have 2 fantastic speakers for this event: a senior software engineer at NVIDIA and an accomplished academic from Cardiff University who has been very active in the Python community.

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Talk 1: "Python on cloud GPUs" by Jacob Tomlinson, Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA

The RAPIDS suite of open source software libraries (https://rapids.ai/) allow you to run data science and analytics pipelines entirely on GPUs, but following familiar Python APIs including Numpy, Pandas and SciKit Learn.
RAPIDS relies on NVIDIA® CUDA® primitives for low-level compute optimization, but exposes that GPU parallelism and high-bandwidth memory speed through user-friendly Python interfaces.
RAPIDS also focuses on common data preparation tasks for analytics and data science. This includes a familiar DataFrame API that integrates with a variety of machine learning algorithms for end-to-end pipeline accelerations without paying typical serialization costs. RAPIDS also includes support for multi-node, multi-GPU deployments, enabling vastly accelerated processing and training on much larger dataset sizes.

Talk 2: "Science analysed with NLP" by Nikoleta Glynatsi, PhD Student at Cardiff University

I have written a Python library called Arcas (https://github.com/ArcasProject/Arcas) that allows users to collect academic articles metadata from five popular APIs. This talk briefly covers an overview of the data collection, and mainly focuses on the insights that can be gained on a scientific field from analysing such data. More specifically I will demonstrate how natural language processing can be used to identify the topic structure of a subject area, and how data analysis techniques can be used to understand the behaviour of authors in game theoretic fields.

At this meetup - we will also be talking about some ideas that we have for events and socials in 2020. Our aim will be to aid any members who need advice on both starting, and developing, their skills in data science.

Unfortunately, due to family commitments, we will not be able to provide a workshop prior to this event. We are intending to resume these at the next meetup.

We also have some local representatives from a Cardiff based recruitment firm, IntaPeople, present. So if anyone is interested in learning more about the local job market for data science, then this is a great opportunity.

The event will be covered by the PyData Code of Conduct: https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct, and we would like to stress that one of the main goals of NumFocus and PyData is to increase diversity in the data science field. Our aim is to have an entertaining and informative evening, which will be a welcoming and safe space for everyone, from all backgrounds and technical abilities.