Brighton Py & Brighton R | Meetup | Jan 2026

------ Welcome, Brighton Py Users! ------

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2026!

We hope you’ve had a restful break and are ready for another great year of coding, learning, and community. We’re excited to kick off 2026 with fresh energy and plenty of R fun ahead!

As before, the event will be brought to you by Datacove. We are a Data and Analytics Consultancy Team based in Brighton, working across Customer Analytics, Shiny and Reporting, Marketing Analytics and Process Automation.

As always, we are supported by Silicon Brighton.

------ Talk Information ------

Speaker: Hansika Gunasekara, Lead Machine Learning Engineer at Ex-Synopsys

Talk Title: Post-Training a Large Language Model

Talk Description: This talk introduces post-training techniques for improving large language model reasoning using reinforcement learning. Hansika will cover the Group Policy Optimisation (GRPO) algorithm and walk through a practical Jupyter Notebook example, demonstrating how the Gemma 3 1B model can be trained to enhance its mathematical reasoning capabilities.

------ Want to share your knowledge? ------

• Talk about an impactful project you've worked on at your company.
• Reflect on an exciting or unexpected moment while learning about data.
• Share a small personal project you're proud of.
• Dive into a unique challenge you tackled with R or Python and the lessons you learned.

Get in touch to speak at one of this year's meetup events
[admin@datacove.co.uk](mailto:admin@datacove.co.uk)

------ General Information ------
Now, refreshments! Drinks and pizza will be served from 6pm. Talks will commence at 6:30pm/6:45pm and the event will conclude at 8:00pm.
The conversation will continue after the event at a local pub – obviously!

Please feel free to register guests and spread the word. We look forward to seeing you all again!