PyData Amsterdam 2023

Keynote "Natural Intelligence is All You Need [tm]"
09-16, 09:00–09:50 (Europe/Amsterdam), Foo (main)

In this talk I will try to show you what might happen if you allow yourself the creative freedom to rethink and reinvent common practices once in a while. As it turns out, in order to do that, natural intelligence is all you need. And we may start needing a lot of it in the near future


I've met a lot of authoritative people in my field who pass out advise that sounds like this:

  • Working on recommenders? Collect all the data! Sessions!
  • Working on text classification? That's a solved problem! Bert!
  • Working with embeddings? There's a library for that already!
  • Working on tabular data? XGBoost for the win! GridSearch!

In short: "this is how you do data science, don't go and reinvent the wheel".

If you spend 5 minutes thinking about "the invention of the wheel" though, then you may start to rethink. After all: the wheels on a bike are different from the wheels on an airplane, just like the wheels of a tractor. And for Pete's sake: that's a good thing! If we hadn't reinvented those wheels, we're be stuck with wooden horse carts.

So ... what might happen if we take the time to rethink a few things?

Specifically, this keynote will discuss the following topics:

  • text classification
  • fraud detection
  • product recommenders
  • active learning
  • embeddings

I hope you'll join me for some new ideas as well as some live demos.


Prior Knowledge Expected

No previous knowledge expected

Vincent D. Warmerdam is a software developer and senior data person. He’s currently works over at Explosion to work on data quality tools for developers. He’s also known for creating calmcode.io as well as a bunch of open source projects. You can check out his blog over at koaning.io to learn more about those.