Data Science Ottawa

Second Tech Event: Lexar’s Bar

In the second of my tech from somewhere else, I went to visit Data Science Ottawa, at Lixar. As with pretty much all tech events, we were plied with pizza and beer. However, Lixar have their own taps.

Their own taps! A stout and a Cider were on and they were actually pretty good! I’m not normally a stout fan, but this was surprisingly good!

Modern Offices

As someone who’s used to seeing modern offices, Lixar’s matched expectations there. They’d moved to those premises not long ago and this was their 4th meetup in the space. The audience seemed a good mix of techies, stats and math bods. I was there wearing all three hats and at once point, I worried the pizza too. But no, those pizza’s were robust structures! No accidents there.

The two meetup speakers were Lixar’s Laura Grove, Data Visualization Specialist, who spends her day using Tableu and Power BI and Jim Provost, Data Scientist, showing off Azure cognitive services with Python and a

Jim Provost, talking us through some math… or not as the case may be. We were sat around what I can only describe as the biggest boardroom table in the world! Very informative and fun talk.

Here Jim highlights the latest results of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC), and specifically the error rate of the deep learning Residual Network (ResNet) for image classification.

Jim also bravely live-demoed a rolling lighting IoT ball called the Sphero, made by the same folk who make the BB-8. Jim coded it to responded to his smiling or frowning face, through machine learning/AI. I’ve asked for the the code, and I’ll get it and publish on their behalf if they give us the yay or nay.

Brains with Microsoft, Visualisation with Tableau

Lixar has managed to gain partner status with both Tableu and Microsoft (Gold). They help clients slolve problems with data, including Nascar. The car theme ran through their bar, as what appeared to be 3D printed cars lined the bottom of a large oil/spice/brewing bottle.

Lixar’s Nascar bar, with dinky plastic cars

The culture at Lixar seemed quite relaxed, though there was clearly a lot of banter. This is something we don’t regularly see as much of in the UK, though it doesn’t bother me (indeed, I engage in it a lot). Lixar are looking to work with the tech community more and whilst the talks of both Laura and Jim were Lixar through and through, they are opening the floor to tech community folk who want to speak and share.

Bloody Gartner!… I mean, Laura Grove explains where Tableau and Power BI and Sinsense are positioned in the Magic Quadrant. Qualifying trade-offs between each.

Jim was a very engaging chap. We spent a good while talking at the bar before the event. He was trying his best to avoid the math questions raised by another chap in the room. The poor guy then got inadvertently blotted out when me and that other chap started engaging in a mathy discussion.

What was also hilarious was the start of Jim’s talk saw him reference a field which I heard as Middlesborough in the UK until I did a double take. Many UK town names came over here through emperial rule.

Conclusion

Yeah, that was alright. Tech events certainly seem to be in line with what we have in the UK, although Ottawa has a lot less than we have in Manchester. These sorts of events are bread and butter and even in Manchester we have 5 competing for your time every single night.

That said, they always seem a little more polished here. Manchester keeps the somewhat bohemian, organic feel but that’s something we’ve always done.