Edinburgh Data Science + AI June Meetup

We can't wait to see you at our next Data Science + AI meetup,

We will be generously hosted by CreateFuture at the Old Stamp Office next to Waverley Station from 6pm on Wednesday 11th June.

Food and drink at the event is once again very kindly supported by Neuron. Neuron's mission is to help businesses transition from finite human labour to infinite agentic systems.

We are lucky to have 2 speakers visiting Edinburgh to speak to us this month:
Owen Lacey, a tech lead at CreateFuture, will talk about Optimising Fantasy Football with AI using Google OR-Tools for constraint programming.
Dr. William Martin, a developer evangelist at dremio who will talk about the tech behind Data Lakehouses.

Schedule:
6pm - 7pm - Networking with pizza and drinks
7pm - 8.15pm - Talks with Q&A
8.15pm onwards - Continued networking

This is an accessible venue, if you have any questions about accessibility please get in touch.

If you have a shoutout / you are hiring please let us know!

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Talk details:

Optimising Fantasy Football with AI

What's the "best" Fantasy Football team? With all of the rules around budget and team selections, how can we maximise our chance of getting ahead of the game?

Using Google OR-Tools, Owen will demonstrate how to use constraint programming and optimisation techniques to select a Fantasy Football team that maximises expected performance within key constraints like budget, formations, and transfer rules.

This is a practical, code-driven session ideal for data scientists, engineers, and problem-solvers of all kinds who want to see how optimisation can be applied in a fun, real-world scenario. You’ll learn:
- The basics of constraint programming and how it differs from traditional algorithms
- How to model Fantasy Football team selection as an optimisation problem
- How Google OR-Tools can be used to explore, evaluate, and select optimal lineups

Whether you’re chasing fantasy glory or just looking for a fresh use case for OR-Tools, this talk will show how the right constraints can lead to the best decisions.

An Introduction to Data Lakehouses

Join Will for a crash course on everything Data Lakehouse. Hear about what technologies power them, learn why everyone keeps talking about Iceberg, and why lakehouses are becoming the de facto data infrastructure for enterprise analytics and AI workloads.

As AI transforms every aspect of the enterprise, the data lakehouse is emerging as a pivotal architecture to bridge traditional data management and modern AI-driven analytics. In this talk we will dive into how data lakehouses, by utilising a table format and tools like dbt, revolutionise data handling by providing a cohesive environment that supports both the vast scalability of data lakes and the refined performance of data warehouses.