PyData London - 104rd Meetup

Venue: Riverbank House, 2 Swan Ln, London EC4R 3AD
Please note:
1. 🚨🚨🚨 A valid photo ID is required by building security. 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please familiarise yourself with it before attending.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.
If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as possible.

Code of Conduct:
This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns.

As always, there will be free food and drinks, generously provided by our host, Man Group.

Main Talks

1. SVD-ROM: Reduced Order Modeling of huge arrays using the Singular Value Decomposition - David Salvador-Jasin
   We present SVD-ROM, an open source Python package to perform Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) of very large arrays using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Despite the high dimensionality of datasets typically encountered in real-world scenarios such as fluid dynamics or weather & climate, these are typically low-rank: there are a few dominant patterns that explain the high dimensionality. The SVD is a useful dimensionality reduction technique for such systems, and has the advantages of being explainable and computationally efficient. SVD-ROM enables the application of SVD-based machine learning methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) or Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) on massive datasets. We employ Dask for parallel and out-of-core computation, Xarray for labelled N-dimensional arrays, and data formats such as Zarr and NetCDF for chunked storage of large arrays. We have developed SVD-ROM keeping user-friendliness in mind, exposing a Python API that enables the straightforward application of methods such as pre-processing, model fitting, reconstruction and forecasting. Additionally, Dask makes code portability across laptop, HPC clusters or cloud straightforward, enabling the user to run SVD-ROM on different computational environments with minimal changes. The development of SVD-ROM has also resulted in multiple contributions to PyDMD, the most popular open source Python package for the application of DMD. In this talk we show how we can fit a DMD model to a global weather dataset tens of GB in size and produce an accurate sub-seasonal forecast (6 weeks ahead) on a laptop in just a few minutes.
2. Explore the Kingdom - Cursor the Data Engineer - Jethro Reeve
   I built explorethekingdom.co.uk over Christmas using Cursor with Opus-4.5 and GPT-5.2 for the data engineering and UI.
   I've pulled ~15 Government data sources and have them represented on a map of the UK. This kind of data aggregation tool sells for thousands to niche consultancies. I built it while playing Minecraft on Boxing Day.
   What would you use it for? (Why) Is the software world so slow to catch up with the capabilities of vibe coding?

Lightning Talks

1. Agentic, Agentic AI for Personalized Care — Lessons and Challenges from Holisticare.io - Mojtaba Kargar
2. TBC
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   Logistics
   Doors open at 6.30 pm (get there early as you'll need to sign in with building security).
   Talks start at 7:00 pm, with drinks afterwards from 9:00 pm at The Banker (EC4).

We have reduced capacity for this event, but there will be plenty of people to discuss data science questions with.
Please unRSVP in good time if you realise you can't make it. We're limited by building security on the number of attendees, so please free up your place for your fellow community members.
If you want me to trim lightning talks down to two or shorten any abstracts, say which ones.