Text Mining and Game Theory

We are very happy to announce our next meetup, on the 9th of October. This event will be held at Tramshed Tech (tramshedtech.co.uk), kindly sponsored by AMPLYFI (amplyfi.com) who are providing us with the venue together with food and refreshments. And of course, we are offering free beer, soft drinks and pizza.

The venue will open at 18:30 when drinks will be provided. The talks will then begin at 19:00 with a break in between for refreshments. After the event, we will be heading to a local Brew Dog pub that is close to Cardiff Central Station.

Talk 1: Timo Mulder - Building a custom text miner in a day

What would you do if your colleague dumped about 200 URLs to annual company reports in your mailbox and asked you to come back with an analysis? Indeed, scrape docs -> extract text -> clean text -> extract entities and phrases -> filter -> results. This talk touches on several universally applicable NLP and text mining methods and shows how to quickly implement them from scratch. Timo is a Senior NLP Engineer @ AMPLYFI.

Talk 2: Dr Vincent Knight - Game Theory. Reinforcement learning and The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Game theory is the study of strategic interaction. In this talk I will give an overview of the subject itself. I will then go on to describe some ongoing research in the field that combines reinforcement learning, evolutionary processes and an explanation as to how lizards might share sources of warmth. Vincent is a Senior Lecturer in Maths @ Cardiff University.

We are incredibly grateful to have these speakers coming, and we invite you all to come to enjoy the evening with us in Cardiff.

FREE WORKSHOP:
As has happened in the previous 2 meetups, there will be a short workshop before the talks for anyone who wishes to attend. This workshop will be an introduction to the pandas library that allows users to view tabular data in dataframes, and allows for database-like functionality. Many say that their Python coding lives are in 2 stages - the times before pandas... and those afterwards! It will feature examples of how to load in data from both text, and Excel files, together with information on how to reshape and analyse data in dataframes, and how to combine dataframes together. We will also look at using basic visualisation of our data, and examine the concepts of how to use the dataframe index, which can also take on multiple layers.
No need to book, just turn up to the venue from 17:30 onwards. You can bring a laptop to work along, or the material can be worked through at a later time if you prefer. Any updates will be emailed before the date.

We also have some local representatives from a Cardiff based recruitment firm, IntaPeople, present. So if anyone is interested in learning more about the local job market for data science, then this is a great opportunity.

The event will be covered by the PyData Code of Conduct: https://numfocus.org/code-of-conduct, and we would like to stress that one of the main goals of NumFocus and PyData is to increase diversity in the data science field. Our aim is to have an entertaining and informative evening, which will be a welcoming and safe space for everyone, from all backgrounds and technical abilities.