mClinica attends first PH-hosted PyCon APAC in 2019
Beginners, students and professionals all gathered together to learn about Python and its role in Web Development, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Python Conference (PyCon) 2019. For the first time ever, Philippines hosted this year’s conference at iAcademy Nexus, Makati City, last February 23–24, 2019, and gathered 500 participants from different parts of Asia.
PyCon is the largest gathering of Python developers in the Asia Pacific and among the participants are mClinica’s very own technical team. Python Philippines’ co-founder, Matt Lebrun, did the opening remarks on the first day.
Back in 2013, the conference started out with the Python User Group in Singapore and PyCon has been held annually across Asia since then. Its founder, Dr. Liew Beng Keat, started as the first keynote speaker with his topic “Back to the Future”, detailing the history of PyCon and its regional communities. Moving forward, he encouraged more volunteers and sponsorship opportunities in order to further expand the community.
Django’s co-creator, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, is the second keynote speaker and he discussed conducting technical interviews. He recommended that the best techniques to hire developers is to use behavioral questions, take-home exercises and lab exercises.
The third keynote speaker is Suzy Lee, CTO at Bridge Southeast Asia. She explained in her talk “Black Box Model Predictions” how Python tools and libraries LIME, ELI5 and Skater, came up with such predictions. As accurate as the results are, it is important for data scientists to interpret the predictions to the business.
After the keynotes was lunch, a time to interact with partner communities such as Women Who Code Manila and groups with specific topics like DevOps or Board Games to socialize and make friends.
The first day ended with various workshops and talks people could choose from:
- Python’s role in biomedical science by solving questions in cancer evolution
- Python packages and tools for Data Science and Machine Learning like Numpy, Pandas, ScikitLearn, Matplotlib, etc.
- Beginner’s guide to learning Python and Django (by Django Girls organization)
- Using Python 3’s Asyncio (async / await syntax)
- Python’s role in the Cryptocurrency Industry
- Property-based testing in Python using Hypothesis
- A Framework for Transfer Learning on Multi-lingual Text Data for Sentiment Classification
- Learning Empathy to be a better developer
The second day began with the fourth keynote speaker, Tom Dyson, who runs and maintains the Python CMS Wagtail. His discussion highlights Practical Machine Learning in Python — image generation, outcome prediction, sentiment analysis and entity extraction — and encouraged developers to integrate artificial intelligence in their projects.
Talks and workshops featured for the second day are:
- Building Analytics Workflow using Airflow and Spark
- Using Artificial Intelligence and Satellite Imagery to predict the wealthiest and poorest places in the Philippines
- Serverless Python on AWS Lambda using the Serverless Framework
- Automating various tasks using a chatbot, Slackbot
- Using Elastic’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for faster Python apps
- Transforming Text into Data with Machine Learning using Scikit-Learn / Keras
- GraphQL in Python using Graphene for Beginners
- Using Kivy and Tensorflow to create a Computer Vision Application
- Dockerize Your Python Application
- Solve your daily tasks using Jupyter notebooks — JupyterLab, Hydrogen plugin for Atom, VS Code, and PyCharm
- Exploiting Auxiliary Information for Better Recommendation
- Introduction to Testing in Python
- Turning your Flask App into Async using Quart
- The Use of Python in the Data World
- Python with NoSQL + SQL = MySQL 8.0
The event wrapped up with games and closing remarks by the volunteers. The next PyCon will be held at South Korea and Malaysia this August 2019.
