WiMLDS NYC: December 2022 Newsletter
Special Announcements
📣 JuliaCon 2023 Call for Proposals
The JuliaCon 2023 team reached out to WiMLDS NYC as they are seeking proposals for our members for their conference in Boston next summer.
“We invite you to submit proposals to give a talk at JuliaCon 2023.
JuliaCon has traditionally had talks that ranged from introductory to advanced, on topics related to various fields, and from developers and researchers from industry and academia. If you have worked on Julia in the past, JuliaCon is the best venue to share your work with the Julia community.
To get a feel for previous years’ presentations, take a look at our past programs and recordings: (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022).
We are interested to hear about all topics that have to do with Julia. Examples of such topics are:
- Biology, bioinformatics, health, medicine, and health disparities
- Data analytics and visualization
- Finance and economics
- General computing
- Industrial applications
- Julia’s compiler, tooling, and ecosystem
- Numerical and mathematical optimization
- Scientific computing
- Software engineering best practices
- Statistics, machine learning, and AI
- Computational humanities and social science
The most important consideration is whether the topic would be interesting to the Julia community.”
📣 RE•WORK Conversational AI Summit Call for Speakers “The RE•WORK Conversational AI Summit is returning on the 17–18 May 2023 in London, and we’re looking for experts to explore both the latest research advancements in conversational AI, NLP and voice technologies.
The summit will bring together cross-industry experts applying this within areas such as contact centres, customer service, healthcare, finance and much more.
If you would like to share some of your latest work and insights at the summit please complete a Speaker Suggestion form here: https://bit.ly/3iNAnEw
Find out more about the Summit here: https://bit.ly/3UEm6rf”
Inspiration Corner
🏆 This month, we feature four American Nobel Laureates, who gathered before the Nobel Ceremony on December 10th at the Stockholm Concert Hall, Sweden: Jennifer Doudna, Frances Arnold, Andrea Ghez and Carolyn Bertozzi (left to right).🏆
Frances H. Arnold won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the directed evolution of enzymes”. Frances has used the principles of genetic change and selection to develop proteins that solve humankind’s chemical problems. “In 1993, Arnold conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes, which are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. The uses of her results include more environmentally friendly manufacturing of chemical substances, such as pharmaceuticals, and the production of renewable fuels.”
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna jointly won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing” through CRISPR technology. “In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier developed a method for high-precision genome editing. They used the immune system of a bacterium, which disables viruses by cutting their DNA up with a type of genetic scissors. By extracting and simplifying the genetic scissors’ molecular components, they made it generally applicable. The CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors can lead to new scientific discoveries, better crops and new weapons in the fight against cancer and genetic diseases.”
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” “A black hole is a supermassive compact object with a gravitational force so large that nothing, not even light, can escape from it…. Since the 1990s, Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel with their respective research teams, have developed and refined techniques for studying the movement of stars. Observations of stars in the area around Sagittarius A* in the middle of our galaxy, the Milky Way, revealed a super massive black hole.”
🥁 And that brings us to 2022, in which Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless recently won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” “For a long time, [building increasingly complicated molecules] has been very time consuming and expensive. Click chemistry means that molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. Around 2000, Carolyn Bertozzi started utilizing click chemistry in living organisms. She developed bioorthogonal reactions which take place inside living organisms without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell. These reactions are now used to explore cells, track biological processes, and improve the targeting of cancer pharmaceuticals.”
External Events
Cross Post: January ’23 Computer Vision Meetup (Virtual) via New York Data Science, Machine Learning, MLOps & Kubeflow
Date and Time: Thursday, January 12, 2022 at 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM EST
Zoom Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3816698250095/WN_XQIZlMP2RQuCFBwBylyRqA
“Agenda
* Housekeeping
* Lightning Talk — Voxel51
* Hyperparameter Scheduling for Computer Vision — Cameron Wolfe (Alegion/Rice University)
* An Introduction to Computer Vision with Hugging Face transformers — Julien Simon (Hugging Face)
* Closing Remarks
Hyperparameter Scheduling for Computer Vision
Nearly all state-of-the-art results on computer vision benchmarks rely upon curated hyperparameter schedules. Though hyperparameter tuning may at times seem like a dark art, extensive empirical analysis of the topic has revealed countless numbers of best practices that are of incredible use to practitioners. In this talk, Cameron will overview these findings with an emphasis on practical applications, aiming to provide the listener with a better understanding of how to properly approach the tuning of hyperparameters.
Cameron Wolfe is a a PhD student in Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, TX and a research scientist at Alegion, a software startup based in Austin, TX
An Introduction to Computer Vision with Hugging Face Transformers
In this code-level talk, we’ll show you how to quickly build and deploy computer vision applications based on Transformer models. Along the way, you’ll learn about the portfolio of open source and commercial Hugging Face solutions, and how they can help you deliver high-quality solutions faster than ever before.
Julien Simon is currently Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face. He previously spent 6 years at Amazon Web Services where he was the Global Technical Evangelist for AI & Machine Learning. Prior to joining AWS, Julien served for 10 years as CTO/VP Engineering in large-scale startups.”
Unifying Data and Models for Cross-domain Personalized Fashion Recommendations via Data Science Salon | NYC
Date and Time: Tuesday, January 31, 2022 at 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EST
“Across industries, people have come to expect highly personalized and dynamic experiences — but for those providing them, managing extensive sets of data across various channels to ensure personalized touchpoints can be an incredibly complex task.
In this webinar, we will explore how Stitch Fix evolved its large suite of recommender models into a novel model architecture that unifies data from client interactions to deliver a holistic and real-time understanding of their style preferences. Stitch Fix’s Client Time Series Model (CTSM) is a scalable and flexible sequence-based recommender system that models client preferences over time, based on event data from various sources, to provide multi-domain, channel-specific recommendation outputs.
Join Kevin Zielnicki, Data Science Manager, live on 31.01.2023. at 2 PM ET where he will share how the model has enabled Stitch Fix to continuously provide personalized fashion at scale, like no other apparel retailer.
Register HERE for free!”
Conferences
- Data Engineering Live Summit — (Free) Virtual, January 18
- RE.WORK AI Summit West — San Francisco, California, February 15–16
- DSS Austin Hybrid: AI & Machine Learning in the Enterprise — Austin, Texas & Virtual, February 21–22
