About us
Come for the content, stay for the community!
Live Festivals - In-Person Mee-tup’s - Online Events
The DSF, founded in 2016, is a diverse community that prides itself on its free knowledge sharing, educational events and festival vibes. Sharing our knowledge of tech from an open source perspective is the only way we can really evolve our bigger ideas. To inspire people to use data for good and connect the community and companies together to better humanity.
Find out more at datasciencefestival.com
Upcoming events
4
Architecting the Future: An Evening of High-Stakes AI Engineering
Location not specified yetWelcome to DSF Sandbox Sessions!
Top tech talks and masterclasses from the best in the industry. Every month, and completely free. The catch? There isn’t one. Just a monthly dose of epic content to power up your data passion!
⭐️ Event: Architecting the Future: An Evening of High-Stakes AI Engineering
📆 Date: Thursday 9th July 2026
⏰ Time: 6:00 – 9:00 PM BST
📍 Location: London, UK🎟️ CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE BALLOT! 🎟️
💡 About the event:
The “Chatbot” era of AI is over. For technologists in Financial Services, the real challenge is not writing a prompt. It is orchestration, security at scale, and integrating AI into complex, business-critical systems.
Join Faculty and the Data Science Festival for our final in-person meetup before the summer break. This evening is designed specifically for practitioners building production AI systems and navigating the realities of deploying GenAI in regulated environments.
We are stripping away the hype and taking a practical look at the architectural challenges, lessons learned, and engineering decisions involved in moving AI from proof of concept to production. Through two technical talks and a panel discussion, we will explore how organisations are building secure, scalable, and reliable AI systems that can operate in the real world. We will explore topics include retrieval systems, LLM orchestration, and agentic AI in enterprise environments.
No fluff. No “AI will change the world” introductions. Just senior practitioners, technical discussions, real-world architecture challenges, and a few drinks to facilitate the “how did you actually solve that?” conversations.
Food, drinks, and networking with fellow practitioners will be available throughout the evening.
Who is this for?
This event is curated for Senior and Lead Machine Learning Engineers, Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Data Architects, and Applied Scientists.
While many examples come from Financial Services and Insurance, the architectural patterns and engineering lessons will be relevant to anyone building production AI systems at scale.
Talk 1: Scaling the Haystack: The engineering reality of processing thousands of sensitive documents for retrieval
Brandon Lim, Senior ML Engineer @ FacultyMost document processing pipelines look straightforward until you throw thousands of real-world files at them. Inconsistent formats, sensitive data, access controls, and scale all expose the gaps that prototype pipelines paper over. This talk covers the full journey from raw document ingestion to production-ready AI search: including data storage strategies, embedding and indexing, retrieval architecture, and how to keep quality and compliance intact as your corpus grows.
Talk 2: Claims Without the Hallucinations: A masterclass in LLM orchestration and deterministic outputs in production-grade environments.
Prudence Leung, Senior Data Scientist @ FacultyIn high-stakes corporate workflows, production reliability is on the frontlines of preventing severe financial, legal or regulatory risk. It’s about architecture: validating outputs at every boundary and orchestrating multi-step pipelines so they’re resumable, observable, and safe to retry.
This talk covers practical layers of that architecture, such as using Pydantic to turn LLM outputs into hard pass/fail gates, and durable execution frameworks like DBOS and Temporal to make multi-step pipelines resumable and safe to retry. The goal throughout is keep deterministic logic deterministic, and contain the probabilistic parts.Talk 3: Panel - The Autonomous Underwriter: How do you integrate GenAI agents into legacy insurance systems without breaking the business?
Chris Mullan, Head of Data and AI @ CFC Underwriting
Divish Rengasamy, Lead ML Engineer @ Faculty
Hanne Carlsson, Senior Data Scientist @ Faculty
Hosted by Michelle Conway, Lead ML & AI Engineer @ Lloyds Banking GroupAgentic AI promises to transform underwriting but legacy systems, regulatory constraints, and organizational complexity make the path from demo to production far harder than it appears. Beyond the software engineering, this is a massive change management and operational transformation. Drawing on real-world experience, this panel unpacks the friction of decoupling agents from brittle dependencies, managing risk acceptance, and building systems that improve over time without creating new operational risks.
🕧 Schedule:
6:00 PM – Doors open – networking with food and refreshments
6:45 PM – Intro
6:50 PM – Talk 1 (including Q&A)
7:10 PM – Talk 2 (including Q&A)
7:30 PM – Short comfort break
7:40 PM – Panel discussion
8:20 PM – Networking with refreshments
9:00 PM – Event close🎟️ CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE BALLOT! 🎟️
🎟️ IMPORTANT: Due to high demand and limited space, tickets for this event will be allocated by a ballot. Applying does not guarantee entry. Successful applicants will be notified throughout June and early July. If you have not received confirmation by July 6th, this means your ballot ticket was not drawn this time.
🚨 PLEASE NOTE: Clicking 'attend' does not register you for the event. You will need to register for the event on the link provided below to receive a QR code ticket via email. If you do not have a QR code, you will not be able to attend the event.
31 attendees
Online event: The Mathematics of Transformers and Large Language Models
·OnlineOnlineWelcome to DSF Sandbox Sessions!
Top tech talks and masterclasses from the best in the industry. Every month, and completely free. The catch? There isn’t one. Just a monthly dose of epic content to power up your data passion!
⭐️ The Mathematics of Transformers and Large Language Models
📆 Wednesday 5th August 2026
⏰ 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM BST
💻 Online webinar🎟️ CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE! 🎟️
💡 About the event:
Join us for this free online session with David Hoyle, Research Data Scientist Specialist at dunnhumby, as he explores the mathematics behind Transformers and Large Language Models, helping data scientists better understand what is happening under the hood of today’s AI systems.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are everywhere. They are extremely powerful, versatile and useful. However, many data scientists only use them as a tool, not getting to grips with understanding how they work from a computational and mathematical perspective, nor understanding why they give the output that they do. Yet, at their heart LLMs use simple mathematical ideas and tools, such as “attention” and “transformer” blocks. Those mathematical ideas are accessible to every data scientist with a grounding in the basics of linear algebra, probability, and machine learning. In this talk I will provide a high-level explanation of the core mathematics concepts behind LLMs and Transformers, focusing on how they use attention to predict the next token in a sequence of tokens. This 1hr talk is intended to be introductory. It will not make you a prompting expert, it will not make you an expert in training multi-billion parameter foundational models, nor will it make you rich. It will give you a basic grounding of what’s inside an LLM and it will give you more confidence that you know what’s going on under the hood the next time you use an LLM.
🎤 Speaker:
David Hoyle, Research Data Scientist Specialist @ dunnhumby
Dr. David Hoyle is a Research Data Science Specialist at dunnhumby, where he builds demand forecasting models and algorithms for grocery retailers worldwide. He has worked as a Data Scientist in the commercial sector for 15 years. Before that he was an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics and Machine Learning at the University of Manchester, UK, and at the University of Exeter, UK. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and continues to publish academic articles on various mathematical, statistical, machine learning, and AI topics. He also enjoys explaining mathematical and statistical concepts, showing how they are relevant to real-world problems and challenges, and so he regularly writes posts for his own blog and for dunnhumby. He is heavily involved with the UK Royal Statistical Society, acting as Data Science and AI board member for the society’s annual international conference. He has recently authored a book on mathematics for Data Science – “15 Math Concepts Every Data Scientist Should Know’’ – published by Packt.
🎟️ CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE! 🎟️
Registering for the event: Click the ‘Register here’ button using the link provided. Once you have completed the registration form, you will receive an email containing your unique webinar joining link. You will also receive reminder emails one week, one day, and one hour before the event.
🚨 PLEASE NOTE: Clicking ‘Attend’ on Meetup does not register you for the event. You must register using the link below to receive your webinar joining link. Without a joining link, you will not be able to attend.
18 attendees
Online event: The Mathematics of Transformers and Large Language Models
·OnlineOnlineWelcome to DSF Sandbox Sessions!
Top tech talks and masterclasses from the best in the industry. Every month, and completely free. The catch? There isn’t one. Just a monthly dose of epic content to power up your data passion!
⭐️ The Mathematics of Transformers and Large Language Models
📆 Wednesday 5th August 2026
⏰ 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM BST
💻 Online webinar🎟️ CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE! 🎟️
💡 About the event:
Join us for this free online session with David Hoyle, Research Data Scientist Specialist at dunnhumby, as he explores the mathematics behind Transformers and Large Language Models, helping data scientists better understand what is happening under the hood of today’s AI systems.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are everywhere. They are extremely powerful, versatile and useful. However, many data scientists only use them as a tool, not getting to grips with understanding how they work from a computational and mathematical perspective, nor understanding why they give the output that they do. Yet, at their heart LLMs use simple mathematical ideas and tools, such as “attention” and “transformer” blocks. Those mathematical ideas are accessible to every data scientist with a grounding in the basics of linear algebra, probability, and machine learning. In this talk I will provide a high-level explanation of the core mathematics concepts behind LLMs and Transformers, focusing on how they use attention to predict the next token in a sequence of tokens. This 1hr talk is intended to be introductory. It will not make you a prompting expert, it will not make you an expert in training multi-billion parameter foundational models, nor will it make you rich. It will give you a basic grounding of what’s inside an LLM and it will give you more confidence that you know what’s going on under the hood the next time you use an LLM.
🎤 Speaker:
David Hoyle, Research Data Scientist Specialist @ dunnhumby
Dr. David Hoyle is a Research Data Science Specialist at dunnhumby, where he builds demand forecasting models and algorithms for grocery retailers worldwide. He has worked as a Data Scientist in the commercial sector for 15 years. Before that he was an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics and Machine Learning at the University of Manchester, UK, and at the University of Exeter, UK. He has a PhD in theoretical physics and continues to publish academic articles on various mathematical, statistical, machine learning, and AI topics. He also enjoys explaining mathematical and statistical concepts, showing how they are relevant to real-world problems and challenges, and so he regularly writes posts for his own blog and for dunnhumby. He is heavily involved with the UK Royal Statistical Society, acting as Data Science and AI board member for the society’s annual international conference. He has recently authored a book on mathematics for Data Science – “15 Math Concepts Every Data Scientist Should Know’’ – published by Packt.
🎟️ CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR FREE! 🎟️
Registering for the event: Click the ‘Register here’ button using the link provided. Once you have completed the registration form, you will receive an email containing your unique webinar joining link. You will also receive reminder emails one week, one day, and one hour before the event.
🚨 PLEASE NOTE: Clicking ‘Attend’ on Meetup does not register you for the event. You must register using the link below to receive your webinar joining link. Without a joining link, you will not be able to attend.
15 attendees
DSF Career Day - Thursday 17th September
CodeNode, 10 South Place, London, GB📚 Welcome to DSF Career Day 2026 📚
Ready to take the next step in your data or tech career?
Join us on Thursday 17th September 2026 at CodeNode, London, for DSF Career Day 2026 🎉
REGISTER HERE FOR A TICKET! 🎟️
This free, in-person event brings together the data and tech community for an afternoon of networking, career talks, practical advice, and opportunities designed to help you move forward in your career.
Whether you are exploring your first role in the industry, looking to progress in your current career, considering a career change, returning to work after a break, or simply looking to grow your network, Career Day has something for you.
Throughout the day, you will have the opportunity to:
💬 Connect with professionals from across the data and tech community
🎤 Attend talks and panel discussions covering career-focused topics
🚀 Gain practical advice and insights from industry professionals
🤝 Meet organisations from across the data and tech ecosystem
💡 Discover new opportunities, perspectives, and career pathwaysWe believe everyone deserves access to opportunity, community, and a sense of belonging in the workplace. Career Day is designed to bring people together, spark meaningful conversations, and help you navigate whatever comes next in your career journey.
REGISTER HERE FOR A TICKET! 🎟️
⚠️ Please note: Clicking “Attend” on Meetup does not register you for DSF Career Day. To secure your place, you must register using the ticket link and receive a QR code ticket by email. Your QR code ticket will be required for entry on the day, so please make sure you have completed the registration process before arriving at the venue.
⏰ Event time: 12:00 PM - 7:30 PM
📍 Venue address: CodeNode, 10 South Place, London, EC2M 7EB
🚊 Nearest stations: Moorgate and Liverpool StreetPlease note this event will not be streamed, so registration is required to attend the talks and panel discussions in person.
Event details:
🎟️ Please bring your ticket (either printed or on your phone) for check-in. Tickets are non-transferable.
☕ Tea, coffee, and water will be available throughout the day. Additional refreshments can be purchased from SpaceBar at CodeNode.
⌚ Doors open and registration begins at 12:00 PM on Thursday 17th September 2026.
Please aim to arrive early. As tickets are free, we release more tickets than the venue capacity to account for the drop out rate we typically see.
While we hope to accommodate everyone, if the venue reaches capacity, attendees may be asked to wait outside and join a waitlist. Entry will then operate on a one in, one out basis as space becomes available.
Our volunteers are there to help make the day run smoothly, so please be kind and respectful to them throughout the event.
🤝 Networking opportunities will take place throughout the afternoon and into the evening.
We cannot wait to welcome you in person! 👋
REGISTER HERE FOR A TICKET! 🎟️
#DSFCareerDay26
22 attendees
Past events
256
