January Meetup

[jakeret]

Let's schedule a meetup towards the end of January:

Speakers

• ???

Date

• xx.01.2019

Location

• Digicomp (???)

[betatim]

Should we find a theme first or speakers first?

[erikfrojdh]

How are things going with planning the January meetup? Did you select speakers or settled on a theme yet?

[jakeret]

We haven't settled on a particular topic.

@enryH offered to give a talk on RASA conversational agent. Otherwise, we are still looking for speakers

[erikfrojdh]

At some point having "Python in Science" as topic would be interesting. I know there are a few attendees from universities/research centers...

If there is a lack of speakers I could give a talk on writing fast code using pybind11, practical matplotlib or give an overview what I'm doing at PSI with Python as an interface for our C++ control program and deployment using conda but that might tailor only to a nice audience.

[jakeret]

Personally, I find all three topics very interesting in particular how PSI is handling its deployment. This could be very relevant to a wider DS audience.
On one hand it has proven to be rather difficult to find multiple speakers for a specific topic - hence having a talk on RASA and PSI would fit quite well in how things have been working so far. On the other hand having a dedicated "Python in Science" session would be absolutely great.

@betatim @TitusCornelius whats your opinion on this?

@betatim @kmader @jherbel do you happen to know somebody that could give a sci-py talk?

[kmader]

I know a group at ETH that also does quite a bit of the pybind stuff, I'll ping them

[betatim]

I asked twitter to find out if I know someone.

I liek the idea of putting together a science themed meetup.

[jaromirsalamon]

If there would be a dedicated session to chatbots which includes RASA library, I might contribute with some overview, trends, architecture, and approaches and present strictly retrieval-based chatbots based on AIML (pyAIML https://github.com/creatorrr/pyAIML), OIML (https://github.com/open-intent-io/open-intent) and NLTK chat (https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.chat.html). Of course, I am playing with RASA as well, but I am not such proficient in presenting it in deep detail.

Later next year, since I am writing a rigorous thesis on such topic and will continue with a dissertation and survey paper, I can present AI based chatbots. But it depends when it would be planned :-).

[kmader]

Also to keep the PSI science theme strong @Enucatl or @anderskaestner would both have interesting material.