PyData Exeter #8: January 29th @ Innovation Hub

## Details

Enjoy three talks from our brilliant speakers after drinks and networking.
Agenda:

• 18:45 Doors open
• 19:15 Talks start
• 20:30 Talks finish - stick around for a drink and networking at the CUCKOO taproom across the road.

Talks:
Using Python to Help Optimize AAA Games, Matt Osbond
I have worked in a "Technical Art" field in video games for nearly 17 years and I've been lucky enough to have worked on a huge variety of projects. But they all have one thing in common - they all need optmizing at the end. I'll go over some of the ways in which I use Python tools to find issues, and then resolve them.

Making the Most of Pre-Trained AI: Practical Approaches to Black-Box Testing, Olga Zyuzina
This talk explores the challenges of testing pre-built machine learning models, particularly in high-stakes industries like healthcare. These black-box models often come with limited transparency, yet they are tasked with making critical decisions. Drawing on real-world examples, I’ll discuss the complexities of ensuring their reliability and fairness, and share practical strategies and tools to validate their performance.

How the PyData Software Ecosystem is built, Jacob Tomlinson
The PyData software ecosystem is made up of many open-source software libraries that are used heavily in Python Software Development, Data Science/Engineering, Traditional Sciences, Artificial Intelligence and beyond. They were used to fly a helicopter on Mars, drive new discoveries around climate change and generate the first image of a black hole.
But what makes a software library part of the PyData ecosystem? Who funds the development of these libraries? Can anyone get involved?
This talk will dig into the history of the PyData ecosystem, how open-source projects are created and maintained and who builds the PyData software stack today.

Sponsors: Butterfly Data, NumFOCUS, Thinking Connected

A little more about our speakers:
Matt Osbond has worked in a "Technical Art" field in video games for nearly 17 years, working across multiple studios, spanning AAA to VR. Having spent over 8 years living in the US, he has moved back home to Devon. Currently, he works on a central technology and support team with other studios to help them deliver amazing experiences.

Olga Zyuzina is an AI QA Engineer at Bupa Dental, specializing in testing and ensuring the reliability, fairness, and scalability of AI-driven applications. She began her career as a software tester, transitioned to a Machine Learning engineer role, and now applies her combined expertise to testing AI systems. Passionate about making AI explainable and more reliable for everyone, she focuses on building trust in AI technologies through robust testing practices.

Jacob Tomlinson is a senior Python software engineer at NVIDIA with a focus on deployment tooling for distributed systems. His work involves maintaining open source projects including RAPIDS and Dask. RAPIDS is a suite of GPU accelerated open source Python tools which mimic APIs from the PyData stack including those of Numpy, Pandas and SciKit-Learn. Dask provides advanced parallelism for analytics with out-of-core computation, lazy evaluation and distributed execution of the PyData stack. He also tinkers with the open source Kubernetes Python framework `kr8s` in his spare time. Jacob volunteers with the local tech community group Tech Exeter and lives in Exeter, UK.

CODE OF CONDUCT
The PyData Code of Conduct governs this meetup ([https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct/](https://pydata.org/code-of-conduct/)). To discuss any issues or concerns relating to the code of conduct or behaviour of anyone at the PyData meetup, please contact the PyData Exeter organisers, or you can submit a report of any potential Code of Conduct violation directly to NumFOCUS (https://numfocus.typeform.com/to/ynjGdT)