PyData Southampton - 4th Meetup

Venue: Carnival House, 100 Harbour Parade, Southampton, SO15 1ST
📢 Want to speak 📢: submit your talk proposal

Please note:

1. 🚨🚨🚨A valid photo ID is required by building security. You MUST use your initial/first name and surname on your meetup profile, otherwise, you will NOT make it on the guest list! 🚨🚨🚨
2. This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event.

If your RSVP status says "You're going" you will be able to get in. No further confirmation required. You will NOT need to show your RSVP confirmation when signing in.
If you can no longer make it, please unRSVP as soon as you know so we can assign your place to someone on the waiting list.

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Code of Conduct:
This event follows the NumFOCUS Code of Conduct, please familiarise yourself with it before the event. Please get in touch with the organisers with any questions or concerns regarding the Code of Conduct.
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There will be pizza & drinks, generously provided by our host, Carnival UK.
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Main Talks
1️⃣ Combine geospatial data in 3D & beyond with TileDB arrays - Margriet Groenendijk
Have you ever struggled with large amounts of geospatial data, huge volumes of files and many custom formats? Have you spent hours — even days — converting and wrangling disparate data formats and wondering how to combine data from different sources? Then this talk is for you!
The solution? Forget about files or force-fitting geospatial data into tabular databases. Imagine a solution that naturally shape-shifts to the underlying data structure. TileDB is this solution: a multimodal database based on multi-dimensional arrays with which you can model any data type. TileDB is architected around a storage engine that uses arrays to store any data type, morphs into specialized analysis applications, supports a range of indexing options, and features an analysis-ready format designed for cloud object storage.

TileDB supports all geospatial data in a unified way with numerous APIs and integrates well with compute and visualization tools. TileDB has integrations with many tools that already exist within Python, such as Dask, Xarray, pandas, PDAL and GDAL. We also build interactive visualization tools with the BabylonJS gaming engine that streams geospatial data directly from TileDB arrays. This makes TileDB a natural fit for geospatial datasets!

When all your data fits naturally into your database's underlying data structures, it becomes much easier to work with. In this talk I will show examples of how to efficiently work with very large geospatial datasets. I will cover how to ingest, load, analyze and visualize all types of geospatial data and show how to combine and use them together.

2️⃣ Searching for gamma-ray sources in Space with GPU computing - Dr Alessandra Costantino
Gamma-rays are high energy electromagnetic radiation, mainly produced in space, in objects like supernova explosions or black holes. Astrophysicists observe these celestial bodies, to try and understand how gamma-rays are produced in or around them.

Gamma-rays penetrate most materials, they can’t be observed with traditional telescope lenses, that focus light just like a regular camera would. In order to observe gamma rays, astronomers need to use large radiation detectors with thousands (or tens of thousands!) of pixels. The sources of gamma-rays can then be located by tracing back detections in each single pixel to the regions of the sky that could have generated its emission as the telescope is scanning the universe.

This is an intricate problem which requires considerable processing power. In this talk I will discuss how I approached this problem using the NVIDIA CUDA framework to access the computing power of graphical processing units (GPUs) and handle multiple detections at the same time.

Lightning Talks ⚡
⚡1️⃣ Benchmarking Time-Series Databases - Nick Thorne
⚡2️⃣ census21api: a Python Interface to 2021 England and Wales Census Data - Michaela Lawrence

Logistics
Doors open at 6.30 pm, talks start at 7 pm. For those who wish to continue networking and chatting we will move to a nearby pub/bar for drinks from 9 pm.

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!

Follow @pydatasoton (https://twitter.com/pydatasoton) for updates and early announcements. We are also on Instagram/Threads as @pydatasoton; and find us on LinkedIn.