DataPhilly Talks June 2016

This month's regular meetup will be hosted by Azavea (http://www.azavea.com/) and will feature talks by Alberto Cairo (https://twitter.com/albertocairo) and Erik Bernhardsson (http://erikbern.com/).

Visualization for Effective Communication (Alberto Cairo (http://www.thefunctionalart.com/))

Visualization is popular in scientific fields as a means to extract information from data, to spot patterns and trends. In the past decade, it has also become mainstream in the media, with publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and ProPublica embracing it. This talk will discuss what may make a visualization engaging and informative, when presented to the general public.

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami (UM), where he teaches infographics and data visualization for communication. He is also director of the Visualization Program at UM's Center for Computational Science.

He is the author of the books "The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization" (2012) and "The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication" (2016). He has been director of infographics and multimedia at several news organizations, like El Mundo online (Spain 2000-2005) and Editora Globo (Brazil, 2010-2012), besides working as a consultant and instructor for companies and educational institutions in more than twenty countries.

Nearest neighbor methods and vector models (Erik Bernhardsson (http://erikbern.com/))

Vector models are being used in a lot of different fields: natural language processing, recommender systems, computer vision, and other things. They are fast and convenient and are often state of the art in terms of accuracy. One of the challenges with vector models is that as the number of dimensions increase, finding similar items gets challenging. Erik developed a library called "Annoy" that uses a forest of random tree to do fast approximate nearest neighbor queries in high dimensional spaces. We will cover some specific applications of vector models with and how Annoy works.

Erik Bernhardsson is the CTO at Better, a small startup in NYC working with mortgages. Before Better, he spent five years at Spotify managing teams working with machine learning and data analytics, in particular music recommendations.