Last Tuesday Paul van Herpt and I traveled to Lille for a special Machine Learning and Cycling Masterclass. As data partner of Soudal Quick-Step Pro Cycling Team, these are exactly the applications that touch where we as Transfer Solutions can make the difference. Hence Paul and I followed this special course from the IDLab (UGent – UAntwerpen – imec).
The author (left) and Paul van Herpt at the Masterclass Machine Learning in Lille.
Machine learning is already used a lot in sports. In soccer, for example, a huge amount of statistics is at hand: who has how long ball contact, who usually shoots to whom, makes the most runs, who is the most dangerous? That kind of data is already very easily traceable. And in tennis, it is easy to track the ball, calculate speed, etc..
Conferences are a great way to learn diverse topics in your field. That’s why I like to go to events like Pycons and last Friday, PyGrunn. PyGrunn is a Python event in Groningen, the Netherlands. I submitted two talks for the event myself. One of them was selected.
Here is a recap of the talks I attended and the stuff I learned, so you maybe get inspired to attend Python conferences and even speak at these events.
Keeping your Python in check – Mark Boer
Python was originally developed to make coding more accessible. Where at other programming languages you had to tell what type of data type your variables are, Python deduced this automatically. Good for beginning coders, maybe not so good for advanced data solutions.
Mark Boer has experience in strong typing in his data science solutions. He shared how you can ensure typing in different ways: in data classes, using Pydantic and named tuples. The talk assumed that the attendees already had experience with typing. I had not, so it was a lot to take in. But if I can review the video in a few weeks, I hope to catch on.
I think it was last year when I announced that I wanted to go back to conferences again. Preferably as a speaker. But what conference is the best for data engineers? I couldn’t quite figure it out. Then the call for papers for PyCon Ireland 2024 came by on my Read more
Back on the ferry to the north of Amsterdam I went, back for day two of Codemotion Amsterdam 2018.
Keynote
Daniel Gebler from PicNic told us about what they are doing today to bring groceries home for people. I’ve seen two presentations by PicNic before and I could really see their progress from session to session.
Daniel explained how they use a recommender system to make it possible for customers to buy their most common groceries with one tap in the PicNic app. Which is actually hard. Even if you get 90% of precision of your prediction for one item, that means that for a set of 12 items you actually get 12% precision. So they really had to work to get a much better precision per item. They managed to do that by working with two dimensions of data: big and deep data. (more…)
Last Friday I almost felt I had to explain a colleague that I don’t always win raffles and lotteries. Because yep, I won another ticket. Again via the Roaring Elephant podcast. It’s pretty worthwhile listening to them, is all I’m saying.
This was a ticket for CodeMotion Amsterdam 2018. CodeMotion is a conference for developers with topics like the blockchain, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, software architectures, but also front-end development, game development and AR/VR.
Amsterdam from the ferry to the north of the city.
Back for round two of keynotes, good technical sessions and discussing them with fellow data specialists in between. Keynotes First up was Frank Säuberlich from Teradata, who had an interesting example of machine learning for fraud detection at Danske Bank. They used transaction data sort of as pixels and ran Read more
I’m back at Dataworks Summit this year. This time I didn’t win any ticket, but my new employer, Port of Rotterdam, has arranged that I could go. Pretty cool, because I did not want to miss it. This time it’s happening in Berlin.
It started with keynotes. Scott Gnau from Hortonworks announced Data Steward Studio for better data governance. Scott’s message was that your data strategy is your cloud strategy is your business strategy. You should not see them as totally different things. (more…)
