PyData London - 49th Meetup

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NOTE: A valid photo ID is required by building security. Please use your full real names when signing up, otherwise you may be refused entry!
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As always, there'll be free food & drinks, generously provided by our host, AHL.

We are issuing tickets via a lottery - if you want to be in with a chance of a place - sign up for the waitlist! The lottery will be run approx 1 week before the meetup, and we will re-run the lottery to fill any spaces that free up or use the waitlist towards the time of the event.

Main Talks:

Andrea Karlova on "Taking Off with Levy Flights"

Abstract: Stable laws are heavy-tailed probability distributions with sufficient flexibility to model diverse real-life phenomena. The scaling property of stable laws allows for dimensionless reduction approach when designing the model. The family of stable laws includes Gaussian distribution as well as Cauchy or Levy distribution. When we relax the assumptions on tail decay in the central limit theorem, limiting distribution will be from the class of stable laws with stability parameter less than two. The distributions have been well explored for many decades, especially favourited by Benoit Mandelbrot or physicists modelling anomalous diffusion. The numerical obstacles with computing the density of stable laws have been an active field of research. In this talk we give a Stable Laws 101 tutorial, describe the troubles with numerical implementations in the majority of statistical packages and provide an overview of possible remedies. We also show how the stable laws can be modified and used in modelling of the financial products as established in Karlova & Hagan: On Beyond Black

Jakub Langr on "Progressing with GANs: Progressive growing for increasing stability and variation."
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently reached a few tremendous milestones: generating full-HD synthetic faces, to image compression better than the state of the art to cryptography. In this talk, we will start with the basics of generative models, but eventually, explore the state of the art in generating full HD images as presented in https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196

Lightning Talks:

Calvin Giles on "Why polar bears are the pandas of the C"
Abstract: Introducing 'polars', a timeseries library that implements a subset of the functionality that you'd expect in pandas, in C++14

Will Taylor on "Top 10 interesting problem spaces to get involved in based on the level of investment from U.K. and US Venture Capital finds."
Abstract: “Venture Capital funds are usually the “+£1m ticket” investors into a startup. They track technologies and their value to the world carefully and place big bets, so their investment patterns are a good metric for what will both add value to the world and be investable”

Logistics:

Doors open at 6.30pm (get there early as you have to sign-in via AHL's security), talks start at 7 pm, drinks from 9 pm in the bar. We normally have >200 folks in the room so there's plenty of people to discuss data science questions with!

Please unRSVP in good time if you realize you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members!

Follow @pydatalondon (https://twitter.com/pydatalondon) for updates and early announcements. See you on the 2nd!