PyData Montreal Meetup #27 (in-person | en personne)

🔔 New PyData meetup alert 🔔

📢 The #MontrealDataCommunity is back at it again with yet another awesome meetup in store for the community. On the docket:

• Tiago Tex Pine, from Prodigy Education
• Raymond Li, from ServiceNow Research

We are very grateful to ServiceNow for allowing us to host this event at their offices in the Mile-Ex 🎉.

IMPORTANT :

• The access point is 6650 Rue Saint-Urbain #500, Montreal, Quebec H2S 3G9
• Get your proof of attendance with you (available on the meetup event page or received per email), for us to check your status (waiting list or not) at the venue.

📊🤖 Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from some of the brightest minds in the Montreal data space, as well as meet fellow data practitioners & enthusiasts. We’re excited to see you there l! 👋😄

AGENDA

• 17h30 - Open doors
• 18h00 - Introduction
• 18h10 - Talk #1
• 18h50 - Break, Pizza & Networking
• 19h10 - Talk #2
• 19h50 - Final notes, break and networking
• 21h00 - End of event

TALKS
1. How Machine Learning Can Help Game Design, By Tiago Tex Pine

Description of the talk :
The behaviour of players in a video game are high-dimensional datasets, with their own characteristics and shapes, different from any other industry. When applied with the right domain knowledge of game design and behavioural science, Machine Learning techniques can do wonders to help game makers find incredible insights to improve mechanics and the metagame of a game title.

2. BigCode: Open and Responsible development of Large Language Models for code, By Raymond Li

Description of the talk:
The BigCode project is an open scientific collaboration focused on the responsible development of large language models for code. In partnership with Software Heritage, we build The Stack v2 on top of the digital commons of their source code archive. Alongside the Software Heritage data, we carefully select other high-quality data sources. We train StarCoder2 models with 3B, 7B and 15B parameters and thoroughly evaluate them on a comprehensive set of Code LLM benchmarks. We find that our models often outperform other models of similar sizes. We make the model weights and the dataset available under permissive licenses.

SPEAKER BIOS
Tiago Tex Pine: I am a project leader, game designer and data scientist developing video games since 2005. I've worked with and led teams of all sizes in making 30+ games, across many different genres and platforms. Designer of game economies and free-to-play games since 2011, I'm an enthusiast of applying data science and machine learning to find deep insights into the many multi-dimensional spaces of user behaviour and player progression, and predicting player choices and churn. Today, my goal is to combine the art of game design with the science of statistics and human behaviour to create games that improve people's lives. I also run a whole bunch of tabletop RPGs and Dungeons & Dragons in my spare time.

Raymond Li: Raymond is a Research Engineer in the Large-Language-Models lab in ServiceNow Research. Previously at ElementAI, and now at ServiceNow Research, his work extends across a variety of NLP topics such as summarization or text-to-SQL. In the past few years, Raymond transitioned his research focus to language models, notably for code generation within the BigCode initiative.