May Meetup

Welcome to our May 2026 meetup hosted by Parallax @ The Elbow Rooms. Please see the directions provided on this page.

We are pleased to welcome John Carney from PDFTA and PyDataMCR, and Obinna Iheanachor from Rotork and Wisabi Analytics.

If you would like to volunteer as a speaker for our 2026 programme please reach out to us at lds@jumpingrivers.com.

Schedule

18:00--18:45h: Refreshments (Food served on first come first served basis)

18:45--18:50: Welcome

18:50--19:25: Speaker 1: John Carney (PDFTA)
Building valuable Deterministic products in a Probabilistic world

It's very rare in software to build probabilistic systems. Almost everything that we've built has historically been deterministic. With the advent of LLMs, much more of what we build is either a probabilistic product or is being built probabilistically. This means we have to think about how we build things a bit differently.

John will share some techniques and principles to do this successfully

19:25--20:00: Speaker 2: Obinna Iheanachor (Rotork)
From £8,000 to £40: What I Learned Shipping AI in a UK Engineering Company

In this talk, Obinna will share a real-world case study of building a production AI system to extract data from 4,700+ engineering drawings, reducing costs from £8,000 to under £40. Using this example, he will show how combining deterministic methods with LLMs led to a system that was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than a cloud-only approach. The session focuses on practical lessons from deploying AI in production, including when to call a model, how to manage cost vs accuracy trade-offs, and what breaks at scale.

Bio 1: John Carney

John Carney is Principal Consultant at PDFTA, as an Independent Consultant he’s worked across Data Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, Data Science, and AI engineering; from startups to corporate giants. From greenfield projects to mature business processes.

He focuses on delivering value from data projects, having delivered £10s of millions in value across various projects. John specialises in joining teams, identifying the most important priorities, and technical routes to deliver solutions to value.

John also does a lot of work in building community in the data space. As the co-founder of PyDataMCR, the current chair of PyData London Conference, the Chair of the PyData Strategic committee, and the co-founder of the Field of Play conference. He’s always busy, but always happy to chat about Open Source software, or data in industry.

Bio 2: Obinna Iheanachor

Obinna Iheanachor is an AI/Data Engineer at Rotork, where he builds production-grade AI and data systems for engineering applications. He is also the founder of Wisabi Analytics, where he creates content and tools focused on practical, production-ready AI for data professionals.

News and Announcements

Have a news item or announcement you'd like to make about upcoming data events or job opportunities in Leeds? Comment below or contact us directly (lds@jumpingrivers.com) and we'll do our best to circulate this information at the end of the session.

Please contact the organisers if you would like to volunteer as a speaker for future events.