What we’re about
This is a group for all those interested in extracting value from data, using advanced statistical, computational and analytical tools. At Data Science Sydney we discuss advanced machine learning, feature extraction, outlier detection, bayesian stats and deep learning methods. We are not focused on any specific technique or tool, but the full panoply of methods. If you believe that data is an undiscovered country to be explored for treasure, then this is the group for you.
We meet (roughly) once a month in the Sydney area to hear experts in the field present their perspective and experience using data science. We try to select topics and speakers that cater to a wide audience, from those just curious to find out what Data Science is about, to experts interested in the latest algorithms and hacks. We hope that this will bring together a diverse group of people at our meetups and we leave enough time before and after the presentations to get to know each other and do some good old networking.
Also, we are now collecting our presentations on our youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMNZrokQNSm2UQ_T5VfOLgg
Upcoming events (1)
See all- LLMs from Scratch: Beyond the Acronyms, Back to the Fundamentals - Sachin A.Actuaries Institute (New Venue, note venue change !), Sydney
Outline: In today’s GenAI gold rush, the buzzwords are endless—agentic AI, AGI, RAG, MCP—three-letter acronyms dominate the conversation while cloud providers quietly cash in. Amid the hype, many engineers are left relying on opaque tools and expensive APIs, disconnected from the fundamentals that actually power large language models.
This talk is a back-to-basics deep dive into how LLMs really work, from the ground up. We’ll cover:
• Tokenization and how your input becomes model-ready,
• Attention and the mechanics that drive modern transformers,
• Training loops and loss functions that teach models to predict,
• Chat templates and supervised fine-tuning for conversational alignment,
• And a practical breakdown of RLHF, with a special focus on the GRPO algorithm.
Whether you’re training from scratch, fine-tuning, or just curious about where the cloud spend is going, this session will reconnect you with the building blocks beneath the buzz.Bio: Sachin Abeywardana is a deep learning specialist with a background in Bayesian machine learning, holding a PhD focused on variational inference. Over the past several years, he has dedicated himself to building and deploying large-scale deep learning systems in production. At Canva, he worked as an applied scientist and led a team of ML engineers, developing transformers-based design recommendation models and fine-tuning multimodal LLMs for generative design.
More recently at REA Group, Sachin has been focused on making LLMs practical and efficient — training smaller Qwen models via LoRA to reduce inference costs, deploying zero-shot vision models for property analytics, and scaling experimentation with Argo Workflows and MLOps best practices. His work spans LLMs, vision-language models, scalable inference, and real-world applications of generative AI.Important : please note the new regular venue at Australia Square.
As a new ongoing feature of our events, we invite lighting talk presenters to share what they have been working on. Email proposals to said@presciient.com
Join the Sydney AI + Data Linkedin group https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14297125/We are as always grateful to our partners the Actuaries Institute for supporting the meetup as hosts.
