August Data Science Lightning Talks! (In-Person and Streaming) NOT CANCELLED

EVENT NOTES: The exterior door will be locked but someone will let you in. If no one lets you in, there will be a sticky note with a phone number you can call.

Lightning talks! Come to hear 5-minute talks about a range of data science-related topics, including:

Dr. John Kaufhold, Data Community DC advisor and startup founder, will explain the significance of one obscure, yet crucial, equation in the Attention is All You Need paper, particularly focusing on one-hot encodings. John will be giving the full version of his talk at our September 20 event, How Attention in 2017 Got Us ChatGPT. You can RSVP for it here.

Will Angel, Lead Consultant at Excella and CEO of Data Community DC, will discuss data visualization community-building by visualizing ten years of Meetup events.

Dr. Rebecca Bilbro, Founder/CTO at Rotational Labs, challenges the traditional machine learning workflow and offers a quick tour of an open dataset repository for real-time data science projects.

Dr. Stephanie Eckman is a Data Scientist at the University of Maryland Social Data Science Center. She has a PhD in Methodology and Statistics. She is presenting recent research detailing the importance of design of the annotation instrument, which has received little attention in the machine learning literature.

Parker Garrison, cybersecurity consultant and formerly at an FFRDC, will talk about determining the effects of compounding delays from multiple train lines being run on the same track, and how we could reduce these delays

Dr. Alex Gurvich, NASA Data Visualization Specialist, uses elements of data storytelling in support of the newly opened Earth Information Center to better communicate how NASA's mission extends beyond space to study the Earth.

Llewellyn Jones, Accenture Data Scientist and journalist with Investigative Economics, details the benefits of applying statistics in journalism and possibilities in finding stories with data.

George Rooney, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Fable, will discuss LoRA, a method that makes adapting large neural networks like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion more feasible by significantly reducing trainable parameters and GPU memory requirements.

Chandana Sapparapu, Lead ML Engineer at Sunayu, will talk about getting an LLM to answer questions about your unstructured data using text embeddings plus vector databases.

Professor Jennifer Sleeman will talk about neuro-symbolic learning, its role in scientific discovery, and how LLMs can take this work to a new level of understanding scientific language.

Location:

We'll be in person at the Arlington Tech eXchange (ATX) at Excella Consulting, which is located at 2300 Wilson Blvd, #600, Arlington, VA 22201. Google Maps link. Come up to the 6th floor and turn left to find Excella. The space is a very short walk from the Court House metro station. There is some street parking and several parking garages nearby as well.

We will also add an online streaming option at 7pm ET on the Data Community DC YouTube channel.

Schedule:

We will have food and networking at 6:30pm ET. Talks will start at 7pm. After the event (around 8), we'll head across the street to Courthaus Social to continue the conversation.

Post-Event Links:

Feedback form: https://forms.gle/TQJ7maYcPR5LotkZ6

GitHub repo: https://github.com/abigailhaddad/august_lightning_talks/

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