Cybera’s tools&programs; application of TA&NLP; Calgary AI

We are meeting at the Bow Valley College! Thank you very much for this venue support!

Three speakers are contributing to our meetup in October. Doors will open at 5:30PM where members can enjoy pizza, soda, and networking. The first talk will begin at 6:00PM. Included below are brief summaries of the topics covered in this meetup.

Talk 1: Cybera’s tools and programs in support of data science in Alberta by Tatiana Meleshko and Graham Sucha

An overview will be provided of the tools and projects Cybera - an Alberta based not-for-profit organization - makes available to folks interested in data science, including members of the CalgaryR group. Tools include our free general purpose Infrastructure as a Service environment, which also provides access to GPU resources. Recent results and plans to support K-12, entrepreneurs, and budding data scientists in Alberta through our Callysto and Data Science for Albertans projects will also be presented. Lastly, we seek input from CalgaryR members on a tool that the team has been working on, which strives to apply best practices from the software development world to data science projects through a structured framework. This will include a brief demo and overview of a roadmap of challenges we hope to address with the tool.

Talk 2: Practical Applications of Text Analysis / Natural Language Processing by Naoko Tomioka

The field of text analysis is constantly evolving, and new tools and algorithms become available on a regular basis. Text analytic tools and packages range from low-level processing tools, such as tokenizer and entity extraction, to higher-level processing such as sentiment analysis and text classification. The applicability of each tool depends on the type of the data to be analysed and the intended use of the output. I will talk about several of my own projects in order to illustrate the process of selecting the best tools, and what text analysis looks like in a business context.

Talk 3: Community Development - Calgary Artificial Intelligence Meetup by Drew Gilson

Drew Gillson is a technologist, entrepreneur, and community leader. In addition to organizing the Calgary Artificial Intelligence Meetup, Drew works for Looker, a data analytics software company that is being acquired by Google. Drew has been an active member of the Calgary innovation ecosystem since the dark ages of 2001. He’ll share some highlights and learnings from his remarkable journey, in the hope that it will inspire you to also take the road less traveled.

This event is supported by the Pacific Institutes of the Mathematical Sciences and the Bow Valley College.