October Meetup with Wish Bakshi: MLOps and Igor Cornejo: Geopy

Welcome back PyData Calgary to our first in-person event in over a year! We have two great speakers lined up.

Venue: Platform Calgary classroom 2, use the West entrance (not the revolving doors) and take the elevator to the second floor. Space is limited to 50 at the venue, so please be mindful of your RSVPs.

---------- First Speaker: Wish Bakshi ----------

Title: How to design an MLOps framework: Building operational systems for big data ML models

Description: Data Science is only 20% of an ML lifecycle and generating ROI from developed models requires a standardized framework.
There are multiple steps involved in productionizing ML models; from data collection, model development, deployment, and monitoring. All steps require multiple stakeholders such as Data Engineers, Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, and SMEs, who must actively contribute to building and maintaining the system.
MLOps builds upon the first principles of big data, software engineering, and systems design to generate value from fault-tolerant ML systems. The talk will discuss and showcase real-world examples of ML architectures designed to handle billions of data points daily.

Bio: Wish Bakshi is a Principal Data Scientist at Capital Power where he manages an ML portfolio of Thermal Assets, Wind Turbines, and Commodities trading algorithms. He is also an instructor at the Smith School of Business at Queens University where he teaches an MLOps course as part of the MMAI program.

---------- Second Speaker: Igor Cornejo ----------

Title: Mapping in Python: Using the Geopy and folium python packages

Description: This presentation will focus on demonstrating two topics related to map and mapping:

1. How to use python to create interactive maps, helpful in doing map analytics, using the folium and ipywidets libraries.
2. An introduction to geopy, and how to use this library to interact with several different map APIs like the ones available by: google, bing, azure, mapbox and maquest. These are all free open source mapping applications that are free for anyone to sign up and register to get API keys.

The goal of the presentation is to show how you can build yourself tools to solve meaningful use cases with python.

Bio: Igor Cornejo is the founder of True North Analytics, a social enterprise focused on raising awareness that analytics is a skill, not a role. Igor wants to help people learn how to use the open source data analytics / data science tools developed by the python community. He believes that by promoting and encouraging people to use these tools, it will help create an environment where conversations and topics can be explored using evidence based, data-driven methods available to anyone with a computer.