PyData Lisbon Meetup #5 with Siraj Raval
Discussing Azure, blockchains and… machine learning rap
This past week was quite eventful for me. I attended the school-symposium DATA Science 2018 — in (Astro)Particle Physics and the Bridge to Industry (about which which I’ll have a post soon) during the whole week, but on Wednesday I went to Microsoft’s headquarters in Lisbon for the 5th PyData Lisbon Meetup | Special Edition.
It’s impressive that the PyData Lisbon community has already more than 500 members as there had only been four events beforehand (the first one in last September). The fifth meetup had 200 participants (the maximum that the Microsoft’s auditorium would allow) and for a good reason: the YouTube phenomenon Siraj Raval was in the house!
But before we met Siraj Raval, there was the talk “We ran out of memory” by Silvio Rodrigues and Tim Kock, two of the founders of Jungle AI, a young startup specialized in predictive intelligence. It dealt with machine learning at scale, using the Azure cloud platform by Microsoft to solve problems which cannot be handled by a laptop.
As a beginner in these things, it was fascinating to me to see such large scale machine learning being used in real-world situations. Even though I wasn’t able to follow every single detail, the informality and joviality of Tim Kock kept me engaged in the presentation.
After a small break for some pizza and beer (thanks Microsoft!), it was time to listen to Siraj Raval, with his presentation “AI Networks”, which you can find in his GitHub. He mostly discussed the next phase of the Web, “Web 3.0”, focusing on blockchain technology and decentralized applications.
I’ve only come across Siraj’s YouTube channel a few months ago while I was searching for videos about machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I was very surprised by the enormous number of subscribers. Who knew so many people would watch videos discussing machine learning algorithms and frameworks?
And apparently some of his early videos had him rapping about these concepts! I hadn’t watched any of them, but Siraj was kind enough to showcase his abilities during the Q&A. I confess that that was not what I was expecting to see when I went to this meetup.
Overall, it was an entertaining evening . If you’d like to check, the event was live streamed on Facebook — and, yes, it includes the rap at the end.
