PyData Exeter #13 - Open Source Community Talks @ Innovation Hub
Details
Join us for a relaxed evening of free pizza, drinks and great talks on Python, data and open source software at PyData Exeter!
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.
SPONSORS
Talk #1
Hugh Evans, "Mapping the PyData Community with Python and Web Scraping"
In this talk I'll be walking through my project building maps of the PyData community using data scraped from Meetup. Featuring insights into the PyData community, geo-encoding, map making with Folium, and a call to support your local PyData group.
Talk #2
Anna Andersson, "Organising a PyData Meetup with Ontologies: From Schema to Reasoning"
Ontologies provide a powerful way to move from raw data to structured, machine-understandable knowledge but for many practitioners, they remain abstract and difficult to apply. In this talk, we bridge that gap with a practical, hands-on example. Using the familiar scenario of organising a PyData meetup, we will build a simple ontology to model speakers, talks, venues, and community interactions. From there, we explore how this semantic layer enables reasoning — uncovering implicit relationships and validating assumptions in ways that traditional data models cannot. The goal of this talk is to make ontologies concrete, approachable, and useful, demonstrating how they can support better data integration, clearer thinking, and more intelligent systems in real-world workflows.
Talk #3
Venkata Prudhvi Kante, "Local Shops are closing at record speed. I walked past the empty units everyday - until the data told a surprising story"
I live in Exeter. I started counting empty shopfronts on my walks and every week there were more. So, I did what any data scientist would do. I scraped every UK retail closure going back a decade and built a dataset that didn't exist. What the data analysis uncovered surprised even me and I'll show you the real story behind why local shops are disappearing, and what I'm building to fight back.
SPEAKER DETAILS
- Hugh Evans is a developer advocate and community manager with a particular interest in data and AI. He works in the streaming domain at Aiven where he helps to take care of the Kafka and ClickHouse communities. Out of office hours, he organises AI Signals, a community which hosts talks on real world applications of AI. Hugh is a former apprentice and an advocate for vocational learning as a pathway into an IT career. Here's Hugh's web page.
- Anna Andersson is a data science and AI lead with a background across academia, startups, and consultancy. She has worked extensively with ontology-driven platforms, knowledge graphs, and applied machine learning, and enjoys building end-to-end AI systems with multidisciplinary teams. She is particularly interested in turning complex data into practical, explainable solutions, and has worked on projects across critical and regulated industries.
- Venkata Prudhvi Kante is a Data Scientist who, by day, builds data pipelines, dashboards and machine learning models at South West Water. By night, he is an independent researcher, investigating patterns hidden in public records that the published literature hasn't explored yet. Holding an MSc in Business Analytics from the University of Exeter and five years of hand-on experience across Python, Azure and Databricks. His latest independent research on UK retail structural collapse - built entirely from public data and open-source Python, is available on GitHub.
CODE OF CONDUCT
The PyData Code of Conduct governs this meetup. 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.