[talks] Pydata Lausanne Sept 2025 @ ECOLE42

Hope you had a good summer break!

🎉 We are excited to kick off season 4 with the support of https://42lausanne.ch/! 🥳

Here is the agenda for our September meeting, with 4 talks!

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Building Real-Time Sign Language Recognition with Python
🗣️ Maxime Martin

How do you build a real-time sign language recognition system? This talk explores the journey of creating "Parle avec tes mains" (Speak with your hands), a web application that recognizes Sign Language fingerspelling through computer vision and machine learning.
We'll cover the complete pipeline: using MediaPipe for hand landmark detection, feature engineering for fingerspelling gestures, training Random Forest models with scikit-learn, and deploying with Django. You'll see how advanced feature engineering improved accuracy from 85% to 95%, and discover practical challenges like memory optimization and real-time processing.

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No GPU? No Problem! Understanding Distributed Python Workflows and Clustering
🗣️ Lucas Gunn

Python tasks today can be painfully time-consuming. What if there were a way to speed them up? Here we look at clustering, what it is, how big companies use it and how you can too. I'll show you some cool tricks to build your own cluster and python tools that make it easy to scale your projects locally or in the cloud. You'll leave knowing how distributed workflows work, when they help, and how to apply these ideas in your own projects.

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What is Context Engineering?
🗣️ Lowell Zima

Why context engineering matters and how it unlocks the full potential of LLMs
With large language models, prompts are often seen as simple instructions. But in real applications, success depends on context engineering — the art and science of filling the context window with just the right information: task descriptions, examples, RAG, multimodal data, tools, history, and summaries. Too little, and the model fails. Too much, and performance drops while costs rise.

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What is Python's Pass by Assignment?
🗣️ Artem Kislovskiy

In Python, "pass by assignment" (also called "pass by object reference") describes how arguments are passed to functions. It's Python's unique approach that combines aspects of both pass-by-value and pass-by-reference. After the talk you’ll learn the difference between them and leave with an improved skillset

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🍕🍕 The seminars will be followed as usual by an aperitif ! 🍺🍺

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• PLEAS RSVP: If your status changes, change your RSVP accordingly! This enables us to manage reservations.
• If you are on the waiting list: we will do our best to increase the number of seats, so stay tuned