Edinburgh Data Science April Meetup

Edinburgh's community meetup for people working in - or just interested in - Data Science. We're a friendly bunch of professionals, academics, students and others who enjoy meeting over drinks and pizza and listening to insightful talks.

** By popular demand, you can now RSVP either on meetup.com or via luma.com! **

We are very grateful to CodeBase for hosting us at their location on Castle Terrace from 5pm on Thursday 2nd April. Trustpilot will be kindly sponsoring pizza along with Moonsift sponsoring drinks.

We have two great talks lined up:
Alex Sopio - AI agents at CERN: Building LLM tools for a Big Science collaboration. The ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is one of the World's biggest science experiments and among the most complex machines ever built. With more than a thousand scientific publications and 100s of PhD theses published every year, the research output of this behemoth of fundamental physics is too vast for any one person to grasp. For the first time, LLMs provide a tool to automate semantic understanding and supercharge collaboration between physicists.
Gordon Henderson - Building Diversity-Aware Ranking Systems for Flight Search. A practical look at building diversity-aware ranking models for flight search, where machine learning is used to balance relevance with variety instead of relying on greedy ranking.

Schedule:
5pm - 6.10pm - Networking with pizza and drinks
6.10pm - 7.30pm - Talks with Q&A
7.30pm onwards - Continued networking, moving to a local bar.

CodeBase is an accessible venue, if you have any questions about accessibility please get in touch with us or CodeBase directly.

Due to the popularity of previous events we can only admit those who have RSVP'ed here on meetup.com OR luma.com

Speaker bios:

Dr. Alex Sopio is a postdoctoral researcher in experimental particle physics and a Junior Fellow with the Generative AI Laboratory (GAIL) at the University of Edinburgh. From hadronic jets and Higgs bosons to image-recognition and natural-language processing, Alex has spent his research career exploring how state-of-the art machine learning tools can accelerate discoveries at particle colliders.

Dr. Gordon Henderson is a Senior Data Scientist at Skyscanner working on machine learning systems for flight search ranking. His work focuses on improving how flight options are ordered and presented to travellers through large-scale experiments.