Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Data Umbrella: Milestones

1K views on YouTube!!

These videos have hit 1K views on Data Umbrella YouTube.

A Briefer History of Open Source by Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez

Contributing to Core Python by Carol Willing

Community News

MIT Learn offers “a whole new front door to the Institute”

MIT has now launched a dynamic AI-enabled website for its non-degree learning opportunities, making it easier for learners around the world to discover the courses and resources available on MIT’s various learning platforms.

MIT Learn elevates learning with personalized recommendations powered by AI, guiding each learner toward deeper understanding. It is a stepping stone toward a broader vision of making these opportunities even more accessible to global learners through one unified learning platform.

Source: Dimitris Bertsimas on LinkedIn: MIT Learn, a dynamic AI-enabled website for MIT’s lifelong learning opportunities

Explore Wikipedia through a data map

You can now explore Wikipedia through a data map thanks Leland McInnes. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters. Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page name to find interesting starting points for exploration. Full code can be found here.

Source: Leland McInnes on LinkedIn

Python 3.14 release candidate 1 is go!

The first Python 3.14 release candidate is out!

The second candidate (and the last planned release preview) is scheduled for Tuesday, 2025-08-26, while the official release of 3.14.0 is scheduled for Tuesday, 2025-10-07.

Source: Just released, this Pi Approximation Day, 22/7: | Hugo van Kemenade

NumFOCUS Names Rachel Kerestes as Executive Director

The NumFOCUS Board of Directors announced the appointment of Rachel Kerestes as the organization’s new Executive Director. Kerestes is trained in both the natural and social sciences, and her career spans strategy, advocacy, management, and communications.

PyData Global 2025 CFPs: Deadline, August 6

Submit your proposal to speak at PyData Global 2025 here.

PyData Global will be a three-day virtual event with talks, keynote speakers, and community events. Speakers will receive a free ticket to the entire event. All presentations will be given live virtually.

PSF Board Election Nominations Opened July 29th

This year’s PSF Board Election nomination period opens on Tuesday, July 29th, 2:00 pm UTC and closes on Tuesday, August 12th, 2:00 pm UTC.

For more details on nomination and election timelines, check out the announcement blog.

Resources

Data Umbrella Blogs

Check out our latest blogs:

• Contributing to the NumPy Documentation: A rich list of demos and resources to get started in contributing to NumPy.

• Intro to Zenodo - Advancing Open Science: Learn about a general data repository where any research output can be shared and preserved for the long term, increasing its visibility and impact.

• The Evolution of Open Source: From Hacker Culture to the Age of AI: Explore how open source software has revolutionized technology, collaboration and innovation over the past 50 years.

• Contributing to Core Python: Carol Willing Shares How to Contribute to Core Python.

• Interview with Sam Miyamoto: Giving My First Talk: Discussion with Sam Miyamoto on giving her first talk.

• Getting Started with Bash Scripting: This blog explores the fundamentals of Bash scripting, focusing on how it’s used in data science workflows and how to write more effective scripts.

• Introduction to Git: an introductory session on Git, the quintessential version control software used by developers to collaborate and manage projects.

Data Umbrella Calendar of Conferences

Check out Data Umbrella’s preliminary calendar of conferences here.

SciPy 2025: videos

SciPy 2025 videos (yes 2025!) are slow appearing on their YouTube channel.

All Things Open 2024 Keynotes

All Things Open 2024 keynotes are up. Watch the full playlist here.

PyData Global 2024 Videos

PyData Global 2024 videos have been posted. Watch the full playlist here.

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about one-half dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

A Tutorial for Getting Started with PyMC

August 12, 2025

This one-hour tutorial introduces new users to version 5 of PyMC, a powerful Python, open source library for probabilistic programming and Bayesian statistical modeling. Participants will learn the fundamentals of PyMC, best practices for installation and setup, and gain hands-on experience building their first Bayesian model.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

NOTE: Link to SLIDES are available in the video description.

Contributing to the NumPy Documentation

NumPy is a fundamental, open-source Python library for N-dimensional array programming used extensively for data analysis and scientific programming. As a community-driven project, NumPy is mainly sustained by open-source contributions. This talk focuses on avenues of contribution to the project documentation, an integral part of the software.

Exploring a Career in Evaluation & Learning

This session is a practical introduction to the field of program evaluation. We'll cover what evaluation is, how it differs from research, and the tools, methods, and metrics used to assess impact. You'll see examples from nonprofits and workforce programs, and learn about career paths in evaluation for data analysts and researchers. We'll also discuss how evaluation relates to equity, nonprofits, and grant making. Suitable for those new to evaluation or considering a career shift.

Git Graph Walk Through

Git Graph is a Visual Studio Code extension that displays a graphical view of a repository's commit history.

Intro to Zenodo: Advancing Open Science

Zenodo is a general data repository where any research output (data, presentations, research articles, software, and much more!) can be shared and preserved for the long term, increasing their visibility and impact. It was built by researchers to ensure that anyone can join Open Science. The repository welcomes research from all over the world and all disciplines. Zenodo does not impose any requirements on format, size, access restrictions or licence. "Quite literally they wish there to be no reason for researchers not to share!"

Zenodo: FAIR Principles (Findable, Interoperable, Accessible, Reusable)

What are FAIR Principles in Zenodo?

Zenodo Tutorial: Upload Research Files (documents, slides, datasets & GitHub repos)

This is a step-by-step tutorial on uploading files such as PPT, PDF, slides, datasets and GitHub repositories into Zenodo.

Using JupyterLab Extensions

Make your own JupyterLab extension in this tutorial. JupyterLab is a free and open source, browser based integrated development environment (IDE) that is the successor to Jupyter Notebook. Designed from the core to be extensible, JupyterLab is itself an extension of the Jupyter framework. JupyterLab extensions can customize or enhance any part of JupyterLab. They can provide new themes, file viewers and editors, or renderers for rich outputs in notebooks. Extensions can add items to the menu or command palette, keyboard shortcuts, or settings in the settings system.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Connect with Us

Website & Blog: dataumbrella.org - - blog.dataumbrella.org

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Data Umbrella is on Bluesky!

We are on Bluesky as: dataumbrella.org. Follow us on this platform to get updates!

Data Umbrella: Milestones

Data Umbrella YouTube: 4000 subscribers in December! 🎉

Our YouTube channel hit 4000 subscribers this month!! Special thanks to the Data Umbrella team, our speakers and our community supporters for your support and spreading the word on our content!

Data Umbrella Turns 5! 🎂

Data Umbrella turned 5 on December 2. Happy Birthday to Data Umbrella!

Intro to Probabilistic Programming with PyMC by Austin Rochford hit 10K views on YouTube!!

Community News

Walmart Rolls Back DEI Programs

Walmart is ending some of its diversity programs, the latest big company to shift gears under pressure from a conservative activist. The retail giant will wind down Center for Racial Equity and prevent sellers from listing some LGBTQ-themed items on its website.

CodeYourFuture is an AI Opportunity Fund recipient.

Center for Public Impact has selected CodeYourFuture as a recipient of the Google.org AI Opportunity Fund! Read more to find out how CodeYourFuture plans to use the funding.

Source: CodeYourFuture on LinkedIn: CodeYourFuture is an AI Opportunity Fund recipient.

Open source maintainers underpaid, swamped by security, going gray

This Guardian article summarizes the state of open source maintainer as reported in the Tidelift 2024 State of the Open Source Maintainer Report.

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024

The Computer History Museum gives tribute as the computing world bids goodbye to computer pioneer Thomas Kurtz, an American mathematician, computer scientist and co-inventor of the BASIC language.

JupyterLab 4.3 and Notebook 7.3 are available!

Jupyter Notebook 7.3.0 and JupyterLab 4.3.0 have been released. Read more to learn about the bug fixes, new feature and enhancements that have been made.

Source: Project Jupyter on LinkedIn: JupyterLab 4.3 and Notebook 7.3 are available!

Resources

Podcast: Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"

Check out this episode on Decoder with Nilay Patel as he talks about work, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again.

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Make Your Own JupyterLab Extension

January 7, 2025

Make your own JupyterLab extension in this tutorial. JupyterLab is a free and open source, browser based integrated development environment (IDE) that is the successor to Jupyter Notebook. Designed from the core to be extensible, JupyterLab is itself an extension of the Jupyter framework. Since its release, open source developers have contributed hundreds of third party extensions (652 third-party extensions as of 2024-10-15).

JupyterLab extensions can customize or enhance any part of JupyterLab. They can provide new themes, file viewers and editors, or renderers for rich outputs in notebooks. Extensions can add items to the menu or command palette, keyboard shortcuts, or settings in the settings system.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

NOTE: Link to SLIDES are available in the video description.

Polars & Narwhals: Understanding Expressions When You're Used to pandas

When it comes to dataframes, pandas is the go-to library for many people. Yet Polars is taking the world by storm, and so many data practitioners are curious about trying it out. There is a learning curve though, as Polars introduces some concepts which pandas users might not be familiar with. This talk will be a deep dive into one of those concepts (expressions) and will focus on how you can understand them from a pandas perspective.

The lessons learned will be useful beyond Polars, as they will also enable you to use Narwhals. Narwhals is a lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between dataframe libraries which is gaining traction (Altair, Marimo, scikit-lego, and more are currently using it) - like Polars, its API is also based on expressions. By learning this concept, you will not only be able to use Polars efficiently, but you'll also know how to build dataframe-agnostic tools.

Introduction to Git

This is an introductory session on Git, the quintessential version control software used by developers to collaborate and manage projects. Discover some fundamental concepts, explore its practical applications, and learn how to efficiently use both the command line and the Visual Studio Code graphical user interface (GUI). Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your coding journey, this webinar will equip you with essential skills.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

NASA Funds Open-Source Software Underpinning Scientific Innovation

NASA has awarded $15.6 million in grant funding to 15 projects supporting the maintenance of open-source tools, frameworks, and libraries used by the NASA science community, for the benefit of all.

The Open Collective Platform is moving to a community governed non-profit!

A group of fiscal hosts representing thousands of collectives have created a new independent, community-governed, non-profit organization and have reached an agreement with Open Collective Inc. to take over the Open Collective platform as it exists today.

Black Women in Data Conference 2024

Data Umbrella is honored to be a Community Partner for the 2024 conference “Black Women in Data” conference. Join their waitlist for 2025 information.

Follow the lead organization behind BWID, DataedX Group on LinkedIn to get updates on upcoming events.

The Impact of Toxic Influencers on Communities

There’s a common character that can be often spotted in many online communities. It’s the “toxic influencer” (sometimes referred as “intellectual bully”). A toxic influencer is a person that covers a useful role in a community, but at the same time creates a toxic environment around them that can become bullying in some instances — yet they never over-step the line of proper abuse, so they can’t be easily managed.

Erin 'Folletto' Casali explores toxic influences and their impact on online communities.

Open Science "Dynamic Convergence" Workshop Final Report

In collaboration with CERN and UNESCO and with the participation of NASA, the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA) was pleased to host 90 researchers, students, policymakers, funders, and others from across 30 countries at a two-day event in Washington, DC.  

The event, held September 18-19, 2024, highlighted impactful open science activities, explored collaboration opportunities, and identified practical ways to speed up the global adoption of open science. More details about the workshop, including presentations and videos, may be found in this summary report.

Community Partnerships

NumHack 2024 (Online Hackathon) (Nov 22 - 24)

PyData Global Impact Scholarship group (Impact Hackathon Committee), under the NumFOCUS umbrella, is organizing an online, AI-focused hackathon in November 2024.

The Hackathon is open to anybody who registers. Teams of at least 3 members are encouraged, and opportunities to form teams two-weeks prior to the Hackathon will be announced. Register here.

PyData Global 2024 (online conference) (Dec 3-5)

PyData Global 2024 is a 3-day virtual event for the international community of data scientists, data engineers, and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. Register now, there are discount tickets available.

PyLadiesCon 2024 (online conference) (Dec 6-8)

Attention all PyLadies community members! We’re excited to share that we are in the early stages of planning a PyLadies Conference (PyLadiesCon), a transformative event designed to promote diversity, learning, and empowerment within the Python community. 🎉

Save the date! The conference will take place on December 6th-8th, where we’ll gather together for a weekend filled with insightful talks, engaging panels, and collaborative networking opportunities.

The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained

The world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. The core issue is the fight between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.

In mid-September, Mullenweg wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress.” He criticized the host for disabling the ability for users to see and track the revision history for every post. Mullenweg believes this feature is at the “core of the user promise of protecting your data” and said that WP Engine turns it off by default to save money.

He also called out WP Engine investor Silver Lake and said they don’t contribute sufficiently to the open source project and that WP Engine’s use of the “WP” brand has confused customers into believing it is part of WordPress.

How do we fund open source?

Source: Serkan Holat on LinkedIn: How do we fund open source?

What can modern topic modelling look like?

Leland McInnes has built an interactive map of topics from 2.4 million papers on the ArXiv preprint server using sentence-transformers+nomic-embed, UMAP, HDBSCAN, Toponymy, and DataMapPlot to show what modern topic modelling can look like.

Source: Leland McInnes on LinkedIn: What can modern topic modelling look like?

Python 3.9

Now that Python 3.13 has been officially released, Python 3.8 has reached its end of life. Python 3.9 features can now be considered the "standard" across all actively supported versions.

Check out the official Python version support timeline: https://devguide.python.org/versions/

Source: Jeff Triplett (@webology@mastodon.social)

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Thank you to community member kljohnson for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our video Best Practices for Creating a Data Science Team.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Polars & Narwhals: Understanding Expressions When You're Used to pandas

November 19, 2024

When it comes to dataframes, pandas is the go-to library for many people. Yet Polars is taking the world by storm, and so many data practitioners are curious about trying it out. There is a learning curve though, as Polars introduces some concepts which pandas users might not be familiar with. This talk will be a deep dive into one of those concepts (expressions) and will focus on how you can understand them from a pandas perspective.

The lessons learned will be useful beyond Polars, as they will also enable you to use Narwhals. Narwhals is a lightweight and extensible compatibility layer between dataframe libraries which is gaining traction (Altair, Marimo, scikit-lego, and more are currently using it) - like Polars, its API is also based on expressions. By learning this concept, you will not only be able to use Polars efficiently, but you'll also know how to build dataframe-agnostic tools.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Polars for Data Analysis in Python

Discover Polars, the high-performance DataFrame library revolutionizing data analysis in Python. Built on Rust, Polars offers unparalleled speed and efficiency, outperforming pandas, Dask, and even PySpark. Explore its innovative features like lazy evaluation, memory efficiency, and automatic multi-threading, designed to handle large datasets with ease.

In this session, you'll learn practical techniques for data manipulation and advanced transformations. Kimberly Fessel demonstrates Polars' syntax and capabilities, making it accessible even if you’re new to Polars.

RAGged Edge Box: A Personal AI-Powered Document Search System

One of the most popular embodiments of Generative AI are information retrieval (IR) augmented generation (RAG). Such systems use an information retrieval engine (based on semantic embeddings or keyword search) and then use a Large Language Model (LLM) to extract answers to a given query. These systems require a large amount of computation and are usually implemented in the cloud which presents data privacy issues.

In this talk Pablo presents The RAGged Edge Box project in which basic embedding systems and small local LLMs are packaged inside a multi-platform virtual machine (VirtualBox). The system provides a Web interface that runs locally and allows access to the RAG functionality in a completely private manner. The neural networks run on a ONNX runtime and do not require a GPU. RAG code is implemented in PHP and is easy to modify, requiring a much smaller execution environment than a Python alternative.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

book: Approachable Open Source

I had the absolute pleasure of reading an advanced copy of Approachable Open Source by Brian Muenzenmeyer and I can't recommend it enough! This book is a culmination of years of wisdom from the open source trenches and explores the humanity at the heart of open source communities. It's a must-read for front-end developers ready to level up as contributors and maintainers

Source: Abigail Cabunoc Mayes on LinkedIn

DevelopHer is now free: Playbook for Getting Promoted

🚨 BIGGEST ANNOUNCEMENT YET! 🚨 I’m SO excited to announce that DevelopHer is now FREE for all! 🎉 My goal? To empower 100,000 women in tech to level up their careers globally! 🌍💪

This past year has been incredibly TOUGH for women in tech. 💔 We’ve seen major organizations like Women Who Code and Girls in Tech, Inc. shut down, and AnitaB.org is barely hanging on. 😔 I've felt this pain with DevelopHer too.

Source: Laura Hasson on LinkedIn

Black Women in Data Conference 2024

Data Umbrella is honored to be a Community Partner for the 2024 conference “Black Women in Data” conference.

Follow the lead organization behind BWID, DataedX Group on LinkedIn to get updates on upcoming events.

Data Umbrella’s Newsletter Spotlight

We would like to thank CodeX for recognizing and recommending Data Umbrella’s newsletter as “top newsletters recommended by our community”. Check out the all the recommended newsletters.

Source: CodeOp on LinkedIn: 🌐 Tech Newsletters Our Community Recommends! 🌐 Looking to stay ahead in…

Python Software Foundation: July Meeting Minutes

The July 2024 meeting minutes have been posted.

PyData Global 2024 (online conference) (Dec 3-5)

PyData Global 2024 is a 3-day virtual event for the international community of data scientists, data engineers, and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. Deadline to submit a proposal is October 7, 2024.

PyLadiesCon 2024 (online conference) (Dec 6-8)

Attention all PyLadies community members! We’re excited to share that we are in the early stages of planning a PyLadies Conference (PyLadiesCon), a transformative event designed to promote diversity, learning, and empowerment within the Python community. 🎉

Save the date! The conference will take place on December 6th-8th, where we’ll gather together for a weekend filled with insightful talks, engaging panels, and collaborative networking opportunities.

Resources

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Thank you to community member Sam Miyamoto for her contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our video What is Machine Learning Security Anyway?

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Polars for Data Analysis in Python

October 8, 2024

Discover Polars, the high-performance DataFrame library revolutionizing data analysis in Python. Built on Rust, Polars offers unparalleled speed and efficiency, outperforming pandas, Dask, and even PySpark. Explore its innovative features like lazy evaluation, memory efficiency, and automatic multi-threading, designed to handle large datasets with ease.

In this session, you'll learn practical techniques for data manipulation and advanced transformations. We will demonstrate Polars' syntax and capabilities, making it accessible even if you’re new to Polars. Join us to elevate your Python data analysis to the next level.

RAGged Edge Box: A Personal AI-Powered Document Search System

October 22, 2024

One of the most popular embodiments of Generative AI are information retrieval (IR) augmented generation (RAG). Such systems use an information retrieval engine (based on semantic embeddings or keyword search) and then use a Large Language Model (LLM) to extract answers to a given query. These systems require a large amount of computation and are usually implemented in the cloud which presents data privacy issues.

In this talk we will present The RAGged Edge Box project in which basic embedding systems and small local LLMs are packaged inside a multi-platform virtual machine (VirtualBox). The system provides a Web interface that runs locally and allows access to the RAG functionality in a completely private manner. The neural networks run on a ONNX runtime and do not require a GPU. RAG code is implemented in PHP and is easy to modify, requiring a much smaller execution environment than a Python alternative.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Best Practices for Creating a Data Science Team

Most data projects fail, often without reaching production or delivering business outcomes. Many companies, in their pursuit to be data-driven, adopt an "upside-down approach," leading to wasted resources and no return on investment. Success hinges on four key elements: a strong data culture, the right problem, accurate data, and the right people.

This session defines the "upside-down approach," explore what constitutes a good data culture, and discuss identifying the right business problems plus offering strategies for maintaining a robust data culture to ensure long-term success.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

Breaking Down Barriers to Belonging for Women of Color in Tech

Women of color continue to be underrepresented in the tech industry. In this article, the author describes the findings from her doctoral research on workplace belonging. The goal of the study was to measure the level of workplace belonging reported, the top belonging contributors and detractors, and to identify recommendations to increase it.

Official AnitaB.org Organizational Restructuring Statement 

AnitaB.org, a non-profit whose mission envisions a future where the people who imagine and build technology mirror the people and societies for whom they build it, announced that they have conducted a restructuring that includes a reduction in force affecting a significant proportion of their workforce.

Source: Stacy Devino on LinkedIn: Official AnitaB.org Organizational Restructuring Statement  - AnitaB.org

Resources

Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute 2024

Welcome to the Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute, your gateway to mastering text analysis and data skills across disciplines. Whether you're an instructor or librarian looking to enhance your teaching repertoire, TAP Institute offers a FREE series of courses and webinars tailored to your needs.

OSPOs for Good 2024 Highlights

OSPOs for Good conference was at the UN HQ in NYC in July 2024.
Check out the videos!

Qiskit SDK by IBM Quantum

The open-source Qiskit SDK provides tools for mapping problems to quantum circuits and preparing for execution. Qiskit also provides services to run, optimize, and orchestrate quantum workloads.

Timestamps

We would like to thank the following community members for their timestamps contributions:

• Sam Miyamoto for the video Visualizing Energy Transitions (Exploring Climate Change).

• Susan Maina for the video Build with Gemini, an LLM Model

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Best Practices for Creating a Data Science Team

September 10, 2024

Most data projects fail, often without reaching production or delivering business outcomes. Many companies, in their pursuit to be data-driven, adopt an "upside-down approach," leading to wasted resources and no return on investment. Success hinges on four key elements: a strong data culture, the right problem, accurate data, and the right people.

This session will define the "upside-down approach," explore what constitutes a good data culture, and discuss identifying the right business problems. Finally, we'll offer strategies for maintaining a robust data culture to ensure long-term success.

Polars for Data Analysis in Python

October 8, 2024

Discover Polars, the high-performance DataFrame library revolutionizing data analysis in Python. Built on Rust, Polars offers unparalleled speed and efficiency, outperforming pandas, Dask, and even PySpark. Explore its innovative features like lazy evaluation, memory efficiency, and automatic multi-threading, designed to handle large datasets with ease.

In this session, you'll learn practical techniques for data manipulation and advanced transformations. We will demonstrate Polars' syntax and capabilities, making it accessible even if you’re new to Polars. Join us to elevate your Python data analysis to the next level.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Why Knowledge Graphs Are Hot Right Now

NOTE: A link to the slides is in the video description.

Take a look at our recent insightful presentation on the rising popularity of knowledge graphs. The talk delves into the various facets of knowledge graphs, including their traditional uses for data integration, search, and discovery, as well as their modern applications in decision-making, analytics, and predictions. We will explore the sudden surge of interest in knowledge graphs and the interplay with AI trends. Additionally, it looks beyond LLMs and RAG to gain a broader perspective on the role of knowledge graphs as we go forward in the data landscape. This session provides a comprehensive understanding of why knowledge graphs are currently a hot topic in the tech industry.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Data Umbrella News

CSCCE Tech Case Study: Using GitHub to maintain a static website (CarpentryCon) or blog (Data Umbrella)

In 2023, CSCCE hosted a series of community “Tools Trials” that focused on tools commonly used for community management in open-source and open-source-supporting communities. The goal of the series - which consisted of several live webinars with Q&A and this accompanying tip sheet collection - was to share existing knowledge and provide any scientific community manager with options about tools and use cases they could explore further.

One of the most commonly used tools by these communities is GitHub. In this case study, we summarize how two organizations, The Carpentries and Data Umbrella, make use of GitHub as a platform to host website materials on which their members can collaborate.

Open Source News

The EU’s AI Act is now in force

It’s official: The European Union’s risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting Thursday, August 1, 2024.

This starts the clock on a series of staggered compliance deadlines that the law will apply to different types of AI developers and applications. Most provisions will be fully applicable by mid-2026. But the first deadline, which enforces bans on a small number of prohibited uses of AI in specific contexts, such as law enforcement use of remote biometrics in public places, will apply in just six months’ time.

Source: Platformer newsletter

Introducing the 2024 Quansight Labs Open Source Internship Program Cohort

The Quansight Labs summer internship was created to provide up-and-coming open source talent with the opportunity to connect with the community, work alongside open source leaders, and grow professionally while developing solutions for the larger scientific open source ecosystem. Each project focuses on a different part of our ecosystem, and gives interns a chance to contribute and interact with different open source communities.

Insights and Impact From Five Cycles of Essential Open Source Software for Science

For the past five years, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has supported the maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for critical open source tools that are used globally in the life sciences through its Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program. In this report, CZI set out to review the impact of the first five cycles of the EOSS program to date from multiple perspectives and a variety of data sources, highlighting the support required to sustain OSS as well as the successes of our community.

Source: Carly Strasser on LinkedIn: So excited to share our report on supporting open source software at Chan…

FOSS funding vanishes from EU's 2025 Horizon program plans

Funding for free and open source software (FOSS) initiatives under the EU's Horizon program has mostly vanished from next year's proposal, claim advocates who are worried for the future of many ongoing projects. 

Community News

Getting elected for the PSF Board of Directors

Cristián Maureira-Fredes talks about being elected to the PSF Board of Directors, experiences in the PSF community and what next.

Microsoft shuts down diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) team

Microsoft, a global name in technology, has closed down its diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) team.

According to Business Insider, which viewed correspondence sent out to thousands of employees, Microsoft no longer views DEI as “business critical.”

Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter

Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that promise — with its own newsletter as a start.

Promoting open-source, from Inria to :probabl

Open-source efforts around scikit-learn at Inria are spinning off to a new enterprise, :probabl., in charge of sustainable development of a data-science commons.
Probabl has a mission, given by the French government, to build a "platform of digital commons for data science" The French government is backing us to push the envelope, with the goal of growth of the ecosystem and sustainability.

Source: Gael Varoquaux on LinkedIn

Resources

The Linux Command Line

Designed for the new command line user, this 555-page volume covers the same material as LinuxCommand.org but in much greater detail. In addition to the basics of command line use and shell scripting, The Linux Command Line includes chapters on many common programs used on the command line, as well as more advanced topics.

Source: Dr Maren Westermann on LinkedIn: The Linux Command Line

PyCon US 2024 videos are live

New videos posted! All sessions from the Main Stage at hashtag#PyConUS 2024 are live on the PyCon US YouTube channel.

CSV Conference 2024 Videos

csv,conf,v8 is a community conference for data makers everywhere, featuring stories about data sharing and data analysis from science, journalism, government, and open source.

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Polars

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Why Knowledge Graphs Are Hot Right Now

August 20, 2024

Join us for an insightful presentation on the rising popularity of knowledge graphs. Our talk will delve into the various facets of knowledge graphs, including their traditional uses for data integration, search, and discovery, as well as their modern applications in decision-making, analytics, and predictions. We will explore the sudden surge of interest in knowledge graphs and the interplay with AI trends. Additionally, we'll look beyond LLMs and RAG to gain a broader perspective on the role of knowledge graphs as we go forward in the data landscape. This session promises to provide a comprehensive understanding of why knowledge graphs are currently a hot topic in the tech industry.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Visualizing Energy Transitions (Exploring Climate Change)

This presentation is a demo of how data visualizations and storytelling can enhance understanding and communication about sustainable energy and climate change.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

PSF Board Elections

PSF Board elections are a chance for the community to choose representatives to help the PSF create a vision for and build the future of the Python community.

• Voting start date: Tuesday, July 2nd, 2:00 pm UTC

• Voting end date: Tuesday, July 16th, 2:00 pm UTC

NumFOCUS Board Elections

NF Board Elections process is ongoing. Follow the discussion in the elections GitHub repository.

CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science Cycle 6 Grantees

CZI has announced the grantees for the EOSS Cycle 6 funding. CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program supports software maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement for open source tools critical to science.

Take a look at the full list of grantees.

New Posit IDE, Positron: A Next Generation Data Science IDE

What is Positron?

• A next-generation data science IDE built by Posit PBC

• An extensible, polyglot tool for writing code and exploring data

• A familiar environment for reproducible authoring and publishing

NOTE: Positron is an early stage project under active development and may not yet be a good fit for you. If you are interested in experimenting with it, Posit welcomes your feedback!

Source: David Meza on LinkedIn: GitHub - posit-dev/positron: Positron, a next-generation data science IDE

NumPy 2.0: an evoluntionary milestone

NumPy has made its first major release since 2006!
With NumPy 2.0, significant breaking changes have been made for the first time in 18 years, bringing a much improved type system and a wide variety of other enhancements.

Source: Lucas Colley on LinkedIn: NumPy 2.0: an evolutionary milestone

The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled

After five years of pioneering research into the abuse of social platforms, the Stanford Internet Observatory is winding down. Its founding director, Alex Stamos, left his position in November. Renee DiResta, its research director, left last week after her contract was not renewed. One other staff member's contract expired this month, while others have been told to look for jobs elsewhere, sources say.

Why Open Data is necessary for an Open Source AI

Tonny Callaway takes a deep dive on the importance of open data in open source AI and why we're at imminent risk of getting it wrong.

7 New Rules of Workplace Professionalism: Post-Pandemic Edition

The past few years, especially during and after the pandemic have forced us to rethink some of the ways we interact and behave in a professional setting. Nonprofitaf have put together some of the new rules of professionalism that might help us carry on with our work effectively.

How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

Endadget explores how Meta’s customers have turned to small claims court to get their Facebook accounts back. Read more to find out why issues that are expected to be handled by Meta’s customer service have been taken to small claims court and how the experience has been for customers who used the court option.

Funding Open Source Science Software

The open source science software landscape is vast and ecological. It consists of small, obscure tools that act as the connective tissue for other tools; it also contains ubiquitous pieces of critical infrastructure. In many ways, much of this is invisible to non-practitioners, making it difficult to see and understand the pain-points, and ultimately make good funding decisions.

In this article, Georgia Iacovou explore how the open source ecosystem is responding to the current funding models and what can be done to prevent to prevent the ecosystem from collapsing.

Transforming Engineering Education with Jupyter AI: Insights from PyCon Colombia 2024 Keynote

Lorena A. Barba shares key insights from my recent keynote at PyCon Colombia 2024 in Medellin, where she presented her work on leveraging 𝙹𝚞𝚙𝚢𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙰𝙸 to modernize engineering education.

Election Deepfakes make a Shallow Impact

The world braced for the worst — but so far, politicians are using generative AI in mostly conventional ways.

Note: This article requires a paid subscription.

Birbado: New project by CSCCE

Birdaro exists to provide training, resources, and community for individuals working to scale their open-source project, and in so-doing, grapple with figuring out how to sustain that scaling. The focus will be specifically on the individuals who take on leadership roles in these projects, whether they are named leaders or not.

Resources

NASA Open Science: Transform to Open Science Training (free)

Develop practical skills to elevate your work. Learn how to…

• Use tools like Git/GitHub, Python, Matplotlib, Jupyter Notebooks, and Zenodo

• Make research accessible, transparent, and reproducible

• Understand concepts, such as FAIR and CARE

• Draft Open Science and Data Management plans (required for ROSES solicitations)

Registration link: https://www.opensciencetraining.org/#training-register

Reactive Web Dashboards with Shiny Course

Check out this free Shiny for Python course. You should be able to complete it in 2-3 hours and it covers everything you need to build a full-featured Shiny app.

New Posit IDE, Positron: A Next Generation Data Science IDE

What is Positron?

• A next-generation data science IDE built by Posit PBC

• An extensible, polyglot tool for writing code and exploring data

• A familiar environment for reproducible authoring and publishing

NOTE: Positron is an early stage project under active development and may not yet be a good fit for you. If you are interested in experimenting with it, Posit welcomes your feedback!

Source: David Meza on LinkedIn: GitHub - posit-dev/positron: Positron, a next-generation data science IDE

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Privacy

• Polars

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Visualizing Energy Transitions (Exploring Climate Change)

July 16, 2024

This presentation will be a demo of how data visualizations and storytelling can enhance understanding and communication about sustainable energy and climate change.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Build Your First Database Web App with (open source) Tiki Trackers

This presentation will be a demo of how a power user can create a database web application using Tiki Trackers. Tiki Trackers is the database creation tool of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. It started as a bug tracker and evolved over the years to become a general purpose database creation tool with over 40 field types. Combined with Tiki's other features, it becomes a no-code/low-code platform. Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is the Free/Libre/Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. The community philosophy is to collaborate on features, and not fragment efforts in various plugins. Over 400 people (some representing organizations) have contributed source code to Tiki since 2002. Tiki is the largest component of WikiSuite. While Wikipedia is the broadest unified body of knowledge, WikiSuite is the most comprehensive and integrated Open Source enterprise solution.

Navigating Ethical Data Science: GDPR, EU AI Act & Responsible Practice

This session explores the impact of GDPR and the upcoming EU AI Act on data science practices through the lens of the social sciences and philosophy. We examine ethical considerations like balancing innovation with privacy, mitigating bias, and ensuring model transparency. Gain knowledge on promoting responsible AI development, data quality, and inclusivity. Leave empowered with frameworks, resources, and guides to navigate the evolving regulatory landscape and become an ethical AI leader.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

Research: Why Companies Should Disclose Their Lack of Progress on DEI

Companies are worried that disclosing a lack of progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals will reflect poorly on them. However, research shows that the opposite is true. People view companies that disclose their DEI struggles as more genuine and trustworthy. Transparency can signal a commitment to DEI.

Did nonprofit leadership become more racially diverse after 2020?

Has the “racial reckoning” actually resulted in more racially diverse leadership in the nonprofit sector? The answer? …yes and no. We are not yet seeing shifts at the sector-wide level. But we *are* starting to see shifts within organizations over time.

Source: Cathleen Clerkin, PhD on LinkedIn: Did nonprofit leadership become more racially diverse after 2020?

Is it just as hard to give out money as it is to seek it?

Do you believe in this idea that giving away money is just as challenging as seeking it, take a moment to reflect on it. Is it true? What are the challenges, why do they exist, and who has the power to do something about them? Non-Profit AF discusses possible answers and solutions to these questions.

Let’s Talk About Open Source in Munich (and Everywhere Else)

Tara Tarakiyee - Techverständiger takes a deep dive at the growing momentum of Open Source in Public administrations using examples in Germany. Read to find out what we can learn from given examples and the future of open source in public administration.

PSF 2023 Annual Report

Take a look at the Python Software Foundation 2023 Annual Impact Report that shares highlights from the year, financial reporting, and some previews of what is to come in the next year.

Resources

Podcast recommendation: Your Mind is Being Fracked

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.”

NVIDIA Courses

A recommended list of NVIDIA courses for anyone looking to learn more about Generative AI, Edge Computing, LLMs and Data Science.

• Generative AI Explained

• Getting Started with AI on Jetson Nano

• Building A Brain in 10 Minutes

• Building Video AI Applications at the Edge on Jetson Nano

• Augment your LLM Using Retrieval Augmented Generation

• Building RAG Agents with LLMs

• Accelerate Data Science Workflows with Zero Code Changes

• Introduction to AI in the Data Center

Source: Rodrigo Beceiro on LinkedIn: #generative #ai #genai #edgecomputing #llm #datascience

Timestamps

We would like to thank Sam Miyamoto for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our video Intro to Bash Scripting.

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Navigating Ethical Data Science: GDPR, EU AI Act & Responsible Practice

June 11, 2024

This session explores the impact of GDPR and the upcoming EU AI Act on data science practices through the lens of the social sciences and philosophy. We'll examine ethical considerations like balancing innovation with privacy, mitigating bias, and ensuring model transparency. Gain knowledge on promoting responsible AI development, data quality, and inclusivity. Leave empowered with frameworks, resources, and guides to navigate the evolving regulatory landscape and become an ethical AI leader.

Build Your First Database Web App with (open source) Tiki Trackers

June 25, 2024

This presentation will be a demo of how a power user can create a database web application using Tiki Trackers. Tiki Trackers is the database creation tool of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. It started as a bug tracker and evolved over the years to become a general purpose database creation tool with over 40 field types. Combined with Tiki's other features, it becomes a no-code/low-code platform. Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is the Free/Libre/Open Source Web Application with the most built-in features. The community philosophy is to collaborate on features, and not fragment efforts in various plugins. Over 400 people (some representing organizations) have contributed source code to Tiki since 2002. Tiki is the largest component of WikiSuite. While Wikipedia is the broadest unified body of knowledge, WikiSuite is the most comprehensive and integrated Open Source enterprise solution.

Videos

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Sphinx for Python Documentation Tutorial

This webinar focuses on a high-level explanation of how the Sphinx tool for generating documentation automatically works for Python packages, using NumPy as an example (but won't be restricted to the NumPy use case). We talk about advantages and disadvantages of choosing different documentation systems and how to integrate other types of documents (for example, Jupyter Notebooks) in the documentation for a given package.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

Open source groups say more software projects may have been targeted for sabotage

In a joint statement, the Open Source Security Foundation and the OpenJS Foundation said the attempt to insert a secret backdoor into XZ Utils - a little-known program that is baked into Linux operating systems across the world - "may not be an isolated incident."

The Equity-Centered Participatory Compensation Model (EPCM): A Tutorial for This Emergent Methodology

The Equity-Centered Participatory Compensation Model (EPCM) offers a 4-step process to ensure fair and flexible compensation for community members' participation in research while prioritizing their well-being, comfort, and agency. This model is rooted in equity and community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles, making it an essential framework for future researchers to promote equitable fiscal relationships with community participants.

The End of an Era: Women Who Code Closing

Women Who Code are closing down.

It is with profound sadness that, today, on April 18, 2024, we are announcing the difficult decision to close Women Who Code, following a vote by the Board of Directors to dissolve the organization. This decision has not been made lightly. It only comes after careful consideration of all options and is due to factors that have materially impacted our funding sources - funds that were critical to continuing our programming and delivering on our mission. We understand that this news will come as a disappointment to many, and we want to express our deepest gratitude to each and every one of you who have been a part of our journey.

Community Partnership: The Open Sustainability Policy Summit (May 2-3, 2024) Washington DC & Online

This event will gather lawmakers, policymakers, electrical utility companies, auto makers, technology vendors, researchers, and end users of energy to discuss the challenges and opportunities for an open source model of building both technology and standards to drive the energy transition, with particular focus on how policy and regulation can support this collaborative approach and ensure communities are diverse and inclusive.

• View conference schedule

• Register for the conference

• Attend the conference virtually (Free livestream)

Community Partnership: DataConnect 2024 Conference (by Women in Analytics (Columbus, Ohio) July 11-12, 2024

We are excited for the 2024 DataConnect Conference AND the newest Executive Ticket option!

• Get exclusive access to Executive Roundtables and networking opportunities,

• Admission to a private lounge and workspace

• Receive a complimentary ticket to one of the DataConnect pre-conference workshops

• Access to a “DataConnect Concierge”

• And a lot more!

If you're interested in learning more about the Executive Ticket or have any questions about the conference, contact: info@dataumbrella.org

• Registration for DataConnect Discount code for 10%: dcc24_RS

Knowledge Graphs for RAG(Retrieval Augmented Generation) Course

Enroll for free for the Neo4j and DeepLearning.AI “Knowledge Graphs for RAG Course”

Who should join? Anyone who wants to understand how knowledge graphs work, how to build with them, and create better RAG applications. We recommend familiarity with LangChain or taking LangChain: Chat with Your Data prior to this course.

pixi Version Update: v0.19.0 - 2024-04-10

pixi is a cross-platform, multi-language package manager and workflow tool built on the foundation of the conda ecosystem. It provides developers with an exceptional experience similar to popular package managers like cargo or yarn, but for any language.

Release Highlights:

• This release adds a new pixi tree command to show the dependency tree of the project.

• Pixi now persists the manifest and environment when activating a shell, so you can use pixi as if you are in that folder while in the shell.

Open Source Organizations

Meeting minutes have been posted:

• NumFOCUS Board of Directors 2023 Meeting Minutes

• Python Software Foundation: Feb & March 2024 minutes

Community shoutout

Thank you to Serkan Holat for sharing the A Briefer History of Open Source on LinkedIn.

Credit: Serkan Holat on LinkedIn

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

• GDPR and the EU AI Act and its implications for data scientists

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Knowledge Graph-Based Chatbot

May 7, 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has inspired the world and started a new AI revolution. However, it seems that the latest trend is supplying ChatGPT with external information to increase its accuracy and give it the ability to answer questions where the answers are not present in public datasets. In this session, we will demonstrate how using a knowledge graph as a storage object for answers gives you explicit and complete control over the answers provided by the chatbot and helps avoid hallucinations.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Build with Gemini (an LLM model)

Learn about the exciting world of Gemini API, Google's latest advancement in large language models (LLMs). We explore how to leverage the power of Gemini within Google AI Studio and Vertex AI for various tasks, including text, code, and even image and video understanding capabilities.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Community News

Year of Open Science Recognition Challenge Winners

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the winners of the OSTP Year of Open Science Recognition Challenge. This challenge engaged researchers, community scientists, educators, innovators, and the broader public to highlight efforts to expand access to research for the benefit of science and society.

The tech industry can’t agree on what open-source AI means. That’s a problem.

What does “open-source AI” mean? Edd Gent dives deep into what open-source AI potentially means and what implications the meaning can have on the future of the technology.

Announcing Target’s Open Source Fund

Target announced their Open Source Fund as a commitment to support open source projects they use. In short, Target now directly donates to projects through an internal process that prioritizes representation of Target’s technology team. 

Astropy Community Engagement Report

This report presents an analysis of data collected from an Astropy community engagement survey, with the aim of understanding the community’s composition, participation avenues, communication channels, and strategies to increase involvement.

The rise of mediocre AI

This article talks about the popularity of AI and how it has brought to the rise of mediocre AI. “It only kind of works. It’s everywhere anyway” (NOTE: great article, but it requires a subscription.)

All in Africa

All In Africa is an online educational program that provides Africans with free open source education, training, mentorship, community involvement, and career opportunities.

Data Umbrella News

Remembering Jeffrey Kantor

We here at Data Umbrella are saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Jeffrey Kantor. He was a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Notre Dame University. He passed away on July 2023.

Jeff did a presentation for Data Umbrella, Intro to Pyomo in April of 2023, which was well received. It was a pleasure to collaborate with Jeff. We send our condolences to his family and friends. We are fortunate to have connected with Jeff and we appreciate his contributions to open source and the community.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

• Code quality

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Build with Gemini (an LLM model)

April 23, 2024

In this webinar, we will go through how to work with Gemini AI and specifically fine tune the model using an example of text data related to the Google Cloud Certification.

Knowledge Graph-Based Chatbot

May 7, 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has inspired the world and started a new AI revolution. However, it seems that the latest trend is supplying ChatGPT with external information to increase its accuracy and give it the ability to answer questions where the answers are not present in public datasets. In this session, we will demonstrate how using a knowledge graph as a storage object for answers gives you explicit and complete control over the answers provided by the chatbot and helps avoid hallucinations.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Intro to Bash Scripting

This talk is for all of us who feel like we never learned Bash properly. The goal is to increase our self-sufficiency in writing Bash. We start with some basic Bash commands, but move quickly to combining commands, scripting, error handling and resources for teaching yourself more.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Resources

Job Boards

Here we share various job boards. Do you have favorite resources for your job search? Let us know and we can add it to our next newsletter.

• Data Umbrella

• Diversify Tech

• Women Who Code

• Code for Society

• MLConf

• dice.com/jobs

• #jobs channel on Locally Optimistic Slack

Generative AI

• Generative AI Guidebook = > The minimal resources needed to get a great understanding

• 5 Free Courses to Master Generative AI

News

Open Collective Foundation, a fiscal host with over 600 collectives under its 501 (c) (3) umbrella, is closing its doors. 💔. This news has sent subsequent shock waves through the Open Collective ecosystem and community.

It is with heavy hearts that we share that our Board of Directors has made the difficult decision to dissolve the Open Collective Foundation, effective Dec. 31, 2024. Our staged dissolution process will allow our 600+ collectives the time to close or transition their work.

OCF experienced rapid growth, tripling in size after the start of the pandemic without taking the time to establish the appropriate systems and infrastructure to sustain that growth. After exploring potential solutions, we learned OCF is no longer viable.

For more information, see:

• “Open Collective Foundation” Dissolving Effective 2024-12-31

• “Open Collective Inc” Official Statement: on “Open Collective Foundation” Dissolution (2024-02-28)

• “Open Collective Inc” Investor Update (2024-02-07)

• Open Collective Foundation, Open Source Collective and Open Collective, Explained

📣 Data Umbrella is impacted by the dissolution of “Open Collective Foundation.” If you have ideas on how Data Umbrella can be supported and can find a new fiscal host, please get in touch (info@dataumbrella.org) 🙏🏽

Timestamps

We would like to thank Benson King’ori for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our YouTube video Intro to the Linux Operating System.

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box or email us at info@dataumbrella.org.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Data Engineering

• Generative AI

• Software engineering

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker or topic suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Intro to Bash Scripting

March 12, 2024

This talk is for all of us who feel like we never learned Bash properly. The goal is to increase our self-sufficiency in writing Bash. We'll start with some basic Bash commands, but move quickly to combining commands, scripting, error handling and resources for teaching yourself more.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

A Briefer History of Open Source

This presentation covers a very quick history of Open Source, from the beginnings of its precursor, the Free Software movement in the 1980s until the present day. We describe important milestones in the development of Open Source within their historical context, and conclude the presentation with some ideas about post-open source.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Resources

Advanced NLP with spaCy Course

Interested in getting started with NLP? Check out this free online course on Spacy: https://course.spacy.io/en/

GitHub certifications

GitHub certifications are an industry-endorsed approach to demonstrating proficiency with GitHub technologies. (FAQs). Certifications include:

• GitHub Foundations

• GitHub Actions

• GitHub Advanced Security

• GitHub Administration

Open Source Events 2024

Take a look at some of the upcoming events in open source. The list can be found on the Open Source Initiative page.

PyData Videos

Videos have been posted for PyData Global 2023 and PyData NYC 2023.

Supporting Data Umbrella

Please consider making a donation to support Data Umbrella.

• If your company uses Benevity, which is a donation platform for employer-matching contributions to non-profits, please consider making a contribution to Data Umbrella. Note: this link is active for registered users of Benevity: Data Umbrella on Benevity

• For users not on Benevity, donations can be made directly to the Open Collective.

Timestamps

We would like to thank Sam Miyamoto for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our YouTube video, Debugging in Python (Visual Studio Code).

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• AI, ML, Robotics and Microcomputing

• Generative AI

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

A Briefer History of Open Source

February 13, 2023

This presentation will cover a very quick history of Open Source, from the beginnings of its precursor, the Free Software movement in the 1980s until the present day. We will describe important milestones in the development of Open Source within their historical context, and we will conclude the presentation with some ideas about post-open source.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

What is Machine Learning Security Anyway?

Securing machine learning development and products is increasingly relevant and a growing career field. Joe Lucas, a member of NVIDIA's AI Red Team, introduces the field of machine learning security to help attendees secure their own work and understand how to engage with this new domain of security.

Sneak Peek at Penpot 2.0 (the open source design tool)

Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform for product teams (think Figma, but this is open source). In this talk, Pablo shares a sneak peek into the upcoming Penpot 2.0 release and a practical hands-on demo.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

News

Data Umbrella 2023 Year in Review blog

Check out our blog as we review and celebrate Data Umbrella’s accomplishments and milestones for 2023.

PyGotham 2023 Keynote: Let's Talk Community

BLOG

In 2023, the US Surgeon General issued a report on the “Our Epidemic of Loneliness & Isolation: Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community.” In this talk, we examine the importance of community and the experiences of a few community organizers in the open source space. We explore getting started, staying involved and leaving communities.

Reshama talks about Python and open source communities: the good parts (motivations of joining and contributing), and the bad (things that cause people to leave). She shared examples of communities that did great work but are now no longer operating.

Supporting Data Umbrella

Please consider making a donation to support Data Umbrella.

• If your company uses Benevity, which is a donation platform for employer-matching contributions to non-profits, please consider making a contribution to Data Umbrella. Note: this link is active for registered users of Benevity: Data Umbrella on Benevity

• For users not on Benevity, donations can be made directly to the Open Collective.

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• AI, ML, Robotics and Microcomputing

• Generative AI

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

What Is Machine Learning Security Anyway?

January 9, 2023

Securing machine learning development and products is increasingly relevant and a growing career field. Joe Lucas, a member of NVIDIA's AI Red Team, will be introducing the field of machine learning security to help attendees secure their own work and understand how to engage with this new domain of security.

Sneak Peek at Penpot 2.0 (the open source design tool)

January 23, 2023

Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform for product teams (think Figma, but this is open source). In this talk, we share a sneak peek into the upcoming Penpot 2.0 release and a practical hands-on demo.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Intro to the Linux Operating System

Linux is an open source operating system. In this presentation, learn about the history, licenses, differences between Windows and Linux. Also we will cover how to get Linux running (single OS, dual boot, virtual machines, etc). We'll also cover the flavors of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE and how to get started using Linux.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can post jobs (for free)

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

News

Data Umbrella Turns 4!🎉

Data Umbrella turns 4 on December 2. Happy Birthday Data Umbrella!

Milestone Achieved! (Data Umbrella YouTube)

Data Umbrella’s YouTube Channel has hit 3000 subscribers!

Supporting Data Umbrella

Please consider making a donation to support Data Umbrella.

• If your company uses Benevity, which is a donation platform for employer-matching contributions to non-profits, please consider making a contribution to Data Umbrella. Note: this link is active for registered users of Benevity: Data Umbrella on Benevity

• For users not on Benevity, donations can be made directly to the Open Collective.

Community Events

All Things Open: videos now up

Videos from the sessions at All Things Open, 2023 are now live! The speakers are world-class and the topics are guaranteed to educate and entertain. You can now access all recorded talks on the 2023 event website here. Session recordings will be listed publicly on our YouTube channel in the next few days, so be sure to subscribe if you haven't already.

Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon: Dec 15, 2023

We are excited to announce the Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon taking place on December 15, 2023, hosted by the Chameleon Team! This online event is a unique opportunity for researchers, students, and enthusiasts in the field to engage in the critical task of reproducing scientific experiments. Sign up here!

PyData Global: Dec 6-8, 2023

The PyData Global Online Conference is where users, contributors, and newcomers can share experiences to learn from one another and grow together. PyData provides a virtual forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other.

Cost: Pay what you can (https://pydata.org/global2023/tickets)

Timestamps

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

We are pleased that our last call for speakers in November 2023 led us to organize the following events:

• Intro to the Linux Operating System (Nicholas Luwazo Kyanda)

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Writing bash scripts

• AI, ML, Robotics and Microcomputing

• Generative AI

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Intro to the Linux Operating System

December 5, 2023

Linux is an open source operating system. In this presentation, learn about the history, licenses, differences between Windows and Linux. Also we will cover how to get Linux running (single OS, dual boot, virtual machines, etc). We'll also cover the flavors of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE and how to get started using Linux.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Using Figma for Data and Applications

Figma is a collaborative design tool that lets people create, share and test designs. Figma has over 3 million monthly users, including data people such as statisticians, engineers, data analysts and data scientists. Examples of how Figma can be used in data applications include: creating and sharing data visualizations, documenting the data analysis process, and building interactive prototypes of data-driven applications.

Model Risk Management Best Practices for Data Science

This is a presentation that aims to explain some of model risk management best practices to data science (split of models between input, methodology and output & model validation). The following Python libraries are covered:

• ydata-profiling

• pycaret

• altair

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

News

PyMC Study Groups

The Data Umbrella team held monthly study group sessions with maintainers from the PyMC projects which took place from September 2022 to August 2023. A draft report is in the works. Stay tuned for the upcoming report.

Timestamps

We would like to thank the following community contributors to timestamps.

• Sam Miyamoto for Intro to FluxML and Machine Learning in Julia

• Chinmaya Meher for A Bioimage Data Analysis Workflow with scikit-image and How to Build Your Personal Brand with Your Customer in Mind

• Ashish Soni for An Introduction to ImageIO

CONTRIBUTE TO TIMESTAMPS: We still have about a dozen videos which need timestamps. We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Blogs

Check out our latest blogs on blog.dataumbrella.org

3 Lessons from 3 Years of Data Science

When starting your first data science job, you are equipped with a variety of technical skills that are necessary for the job. Coursework typically focuses on mathematical theory and how to write code. However, some of the most important skills being a data scientist do not only depend on this knowledge. In this talk, Megan Robertson shares three big lessons learned from working in data science and how you can use these lessons to improve your career.

Bayesian Data Analysis with BRMS (Bayesian Regression Models Using Stan)

Mitzi Morris, a Stan developer, shows how you can quickly build robust models for data analysis and prediction using BRMS (Bayesian Regression Models Using Stan). After a brief overview of the the advantages and limitations of BRMS and a quick review of multi-level regression. We will work through an R-markdown notebook together, to see how to fit, visualize, and test the goodness of the model and resulting estimates.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

We are pleased that our last call for speakers in July 2023 led us to organize the following events:

• Machine Learning Visualization Using Blockchain (Kavengi Kitonga)

• Blockchains for Open Source Solutions (Fabian Uwuor)

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics:

• Writing bash scripts

Email us if you are interested in speaking or have a speaker suggestion: info@dataumbrella.org

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Figma For Beginners: Using Figma for Data and Applications

November 15, 2023

Figma is a collaborative design tool that lets people create, share and test designs.  Figma has over 3 million monthly users, including data people such as statisticians, engineers, data analysts and data scientists. Examples of how Figma can be used in data applications include:  creating and sharing data visualizations, documenting the data analysis process, and building interactive prototypes of data-driven applications.

Model Risk Management Best Practices for Data Science

November 28, 2023

This is a presentation that aims to explain some of model risk management best practices to data science (split of models between input, methodology and output & model validation). The following Python libraries will be covered:

• ydata-profiling

• pycaret

• altair

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Intro to OpenRefine for Data Cleaning and Reconciliation

OpenRefine stands as a robust, open-source tool specifically tailored for those delving into the complex world of messy data. It is designed to not only cleanse such data but also to transform it, making it easier to convert between varying formats.

The talk will unfold in three primary segments. The first portion provides a comprehensive introduction to OpenRefine, exploring its purpose, its user base, and its historical evolution. Following this, attendees will embark on a tour of OpenRefine, familiarizing themselves with its download and installation processes, the intricacies of data import, the nuances of filtering and faceting, clustering, as well as vital data cleaning techniques, and the application of reconciliation services. Finally, the session culminates in an invitation to participants to join the OpenRefine community, shedding light on various avenues through which they can contribute – be it through coding, design, translation, documentation enhancement, or user support.

Exploring the Open Source Landscape in Australia

Australia is geographically located far away from Europe and North America where the majority of open source maintainers in the Python and scientific python spaces are located. How does that impact Australia's participation in open source? We will explore this......Our little corner of the world - Open Source landscape and the community that supports it in Australia, with a smidge of GLAM[our].

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

Milestone Achieved! (Data Umbrella Africa Meetup)

Data Umbrella Africa Meetup group has hit 1000 members!

Blog: Reproducible Publications with Python and Quarto

Check out our latest blog Reproducible Publications with Python and Quarto.

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that builds on standard markdown with features essential for scientific communication. The system has support for reproducible embedded computations, equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layouts, and more. This blog explores the use of Quarto with Python.

R Project Sprint

The R Project Sprint was hosted at the University of Warwick in August 2023. Beryl Kanali (of the Data Umbrella team), attended along with 40+ other contributors from around the globe.

Beryl and her pair programming partner worked on the issue on “bugs related to vignettes.”

PyGotham (Oct 6-7, 2023) (Online & Free)

PyGotham is a New York City based, eclectic, Py-centric conference covering many topics. There’s a diverse speaker list, and some things which will be quite different.

Reshama Shaikh (of Data Umbrella Team) will be giving a keynote on Community.

PyGotham 2023

• Cost: Free

• Where: Online

• Talk Schedule

• Registration: via Eventbrite

All Things Open (Oct 15-17, 2023) (Raleigh, North Carolina, USA)

All Things Open is a polyglot technology conference focusing on the tools, processes and people making open source possible. Register here for limited discounted tickets.

NODES 2023 | Register (Oct 24-25, 2023) (free & online)

We are excited to partner with #NODES2023, #Neo4j's ONLINE developer conference! On October 26, join us for 24 hours of free live talks. Don't miss out, sign up today!

Timestamps

We would like to thank Sam Miyamoto for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our YouTube video An Overview of 3D Image Processing Using scikit-image.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Call for Volunteers: Video Timestamps

We are looking for assistance in adding video timestamps.

We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Exploring the Open Source Landscape in Australia

October 17, 2023

Australia is geographically located far away from Europe and North America where the majority of open source maintainers in the Python and scientific python spaces are located. How does that impact Australia's participation in open source? We will explore this......Our little corner of the world - Open Source landscape and the community that supports it in Australia, with a smidge of GLAM[our].

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

An Overview of Information Security

This talk defines what information security is, explains why it is important and provides an overview of the information security career landscape.

Debugging in Python: Overview

Your code gives an error. Or worse: it doesn't give an error, but doesn't do what you want. Welcome to the hard part of programming! What to do now?

In this talk we will talk about debugging, which includes a broad set of techniques to identify the root causes of undesired behavior in programs and eventually fix them. We will start with a theoretical introduction of the different types of debugging, we will describe a couple of techniques that you can use, and we will apply them in practice, both in Jupyter Notebook (using its new interactive debugger) and in VSCode.

Debugging in Python: Jupyter Notebook

Your code gives an error. Or worse: it doesn't give an error, but doesn't do what you want. Welcome to the hard part of programming! What to do now?

In this talk we will talk about debugging, which includes a broad set of techniques to identify the root causes of undesired behavior in programs and eventually fix them. We will start with a theoretical introduction of the different types of debugging, we will describe a couple of techniques that you can use, and we will apply them in practice, in Jupyter Notebook (using its new interactive debugger).

Debugging in Python: Visual Studio Code

Your code gives an error. Or worse: it doesn't give an error, but doesn't do what you want. Welcome to the hard part of programming! What to do now?

In this talk we will talk about debugging, which includes a broad set of techniques to identify the root causes of undesired behavior in programs and eventually fix them. We will start with a theoretical introduction of the different types of debugging, we will describe a couple of techniques that you can use, and we will apply them in practice, in VSCode.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org (*resources*)

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Data Umbrella is a non-profit global community for underrepresented persons in data science. We organize online data science events for the community. All levels are welcome. Our Code of Conduct applies to all of our spaces.

Announcements

SciPy Conference 2023: Videos are up!

All the SciPy conference presentation videos have been posted on YouTube.

We highly recommend the keynote by Rumman Chowdhury: Responsible AI in Practice

PyGotham (Oct 6-7, 2023) (Online & Free)

PyGotham is a New York City based, eclectic, Py-centric conference covering many topics. There’s a diverse speaker list, and some things which will be quite different. For full information about PyGotham TV, see https://2023.pygotham.tv

PyGotham is free and online. Register here.

All Things Open (Oct 15-17, 2023) (Raleigh, North Carolina, USA)

All Things Open is a polyglot technology conference focusing on the tools, processes and people making open source possible. Register here for limited discounted tickets.

PyData NYC (Nov 1-3, 2023) (New York, NY, USA)

📢 Call for Papers Now Open: deadline September 22, 2023

We are in the process of putting together the Organizing Committee and the Program Committee and are looking for volunteers! Volunteer form

PyLadiesCon (Dec 1-3, 2023) (Online & Free)

📢 Call for Papers Now Open: deadline September 10, 2023
The first PyLadiesCon will be online in December. Be a part of PyLadiesCon; we accept proposals in multiple languages, celebrating our diverse community. If you're passionate about #Python and tech, this is your moment. Submit your proposal: https://pretalx.com/pyladiescon-2023/cfp

Timestamps

We would like to thank Daniel Boadzie and Sam Miyamoto for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our YouTube videos From Vicuna to Human-aligned Evaluation, Solving NLP Tasks Using LLMs (Large Language Models) and Machine Learning in JavaScript: An Introduction to TensorFlowJS.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Call for Volunteers: Video Timestamps

We are looking for assistance in adding video timestamps.

We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

An Overview of Information Security

September 19, 2023

This talk will define what information security is, explain why it is important and provide an overview of the information security career landscape.

Into the rabbit hole: Debugging in Python

September 26, 2023

Your code gives an error. Or worse: it doesn't give an error, but doesn't do what you want. Welcome to the hard part of programming! What to do now?

In this talk we will talk about debugging, which includes a broad set of techniques to identify the root causes of undesired behavior in programs and eventually fix them. We will start with a theoretical introduction of the different types of debugging, we will describe a couple of techniques that you can use, and we will apply them in practice, both in Jupyter Notebook (using its new interactive debugger) and in VSCode.

Introduction to OpenRefine for Data Cleaning and Reconciliation

October 3, 2023

OpenRefine is a powerful free, open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. In this talk, we will look at OpenRefine, how it is used and how you can contribute to it.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Blockchains for Open Source Solutions

Blockchain as Open Source: A Case for Africa We will discuss the transformative potential of blockchain, from driving funding access and operational efficiency with smart contracts, to fostering collaboration and restoring trust. Learn how supportive ecosystems are crucial for blockchain initiatives, discover standout partnerships and investments, and understand what we need to do next to harness blockchain's full potential.

Lessons from COVID-19: Non-random Missing Data and Its Consequences

A fundamental challenge for survey and observational datasets is that not all records in the dataset are complete; key pieces of information may be missing.

In this talk Mitzi works through the models and methods from the paper

MODELING RACIAL/ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN COVID-19 INCIDENCE WITH COVARIATES SUBJECT TO NON-RANDOM MISSINGNESS

They write:

In emergency situations, such as a surging pandemic, it is easy to see how the disease process itself may induce non-random missingness of covariates. For example, during a period of rapidly increasing caseloads, such as the Delta and Omicron surges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overwhelming number of cases is likely to limit the ability of case investigators to collect data that are as detailed as those collected during lower-incidence periods. These differences may also be more pronounced when comparing wealthier and poorer jurisdictions with differential resources for case-finding and intervention.

Using the Stan language and CmdStanR interface, together with a simulated dataset of Covid-19 cases and population demographics, where age, gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood have varying degrees of missingness, we will demonstrate how different approaches produce different estimates of Covid-19 prevalence among key demographics.

Community Talks

Community chat: with Yanina Bellini Saibene

Check out our discussion with Yanina on what makes a community.

Community chat: with Mariatta Wijaya

Check out our discussion with Mariatta on what makes a community.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org (*resources*)

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Announcements

Open Source Sprint Impact

Congratuations to Daniel Saunders, who is now a Google Summer of Code Intern for June-August 2023 with the PyMC project. Daniel previously participated in the Data Umbrella PyMC 2023 Working Sessions.

I participated in a PyMC sprint in July 2022, organized with Data Umbrella. I remember Reshama Shaikh, Ravin Kumar, Rowan Schaefer, and Oriol Abril Pla being really nice and super helpful. They taught me how git works and how to tidy up doc strings.

Resources: Job Boards

Here by popular demand, we have some job boards and communities to share:

Open Source Startups

A collection of curated jobs in commercial open source startups. Find listed jobs here: https://www.ossjobs.dev/

Responsible Tech Job Board

Are you looking to find your next career opportunity in responsible tech? All Tech Is Human’s Responsible Tech Job Board curates roles focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that technology is aligned with the public interest. It is the premiere resource in the field for people exploring a career change, new role, or interested in the growing responsible tech ecosystem.

Diversify Tech Newsletter

Diversity tech aims at connecting underrepresented folks in tech with career opportunities. Get events, scholarships and job opportunities from vetted companies in your inbox every week by subscribing to their free newsletter.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Call for Volunteers: Video Timestamps

We are looking for assistance in adding video timestamps.

We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Lessons from COVID-19: Non-random Missing Data and Its Consequences

August 8, 2023

A fundamental challenge for survey and observational datasets is that not all records in the dataset are complete; key pieces of information may be missing. In this talk, we work through the models and methods from the paper MODELING RACIAL/ETHNIC DIFFERENCES IN COVID-19 INCIDENCE WITH COVARIATES SUBJECT TO NON-RANDOM MISSINGNESS

They write:

In emergency situations, such as a surging pandemic, it is easy to see how the disease process itself may induce non-random missingness of covariates. For example, during a period of rapidly increasing caseloads, such as the Delta and Omicron surges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overwhelming number of cases is likely to limit the ability of case investigators to collect data that are as detailed as those collected during lower-incidence periods. These differences may also be more pronounced when comparing wealthier and poorer jurisdictions with differential resources for case-finding and intervention.

Using the Stan language and CmdStanR interface, together with a simulated dataset of Covid-19 cases and population demographics, where age, gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood have varying degrees of missingness, we will demonstrate how different approaches produce different estimates of Covid-19 prevalence among key demographics.

Blockchains for Open Source Solutions

August 15, 2023

Blockchain as Open Source: A Case for Africa
We will discuss the transformative potential of blockchain, from driving funding access and operational efficiency with smart contracts, to fostering collaboration and restoring trust. Learn how supportive ecosystems are crucial for blockchain initiatives, discover standout partnerships and investments, and understand what we need to do next to harness blockchain's full potential.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Reproducible Publications with Python and Quarto

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that builds on standard markdown with features essential for scientific communication. The system has support for reproducible embedded computations, equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layouts, and more. In this talk we'll explore the use of Quarto with Python, describing both integration with IPython/Jupyter and the Quarto VS Code extension. Users can author Jupyter notebooks or documents as plain text markdowns with code in Python, R, Julia or Observable. Quarto includes the ability to publish high-quality articles, reports, presentations, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, Reveal.js and more.

Machine Learning Visualization Using Yellowbrick

Yellowbrick is a very convenient Python library for creating visualizers within the machine learning workflow. With just a few lines of code, a wide range of visualizers can be generated for various stages of the ML process; paying homage to the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In this session, we briefly introduce the Yellowbrick library and explore the range of visualizers. Then we delve into a practical machine learning classification problem and create classification visualizers using the Yellowbrick library.

Events Board: Live Coding Sessions

Data Umbrella has an open source project, the Data Events Board. We have had working sessions with community members to learn to contribute to the open source project, as well as build their professional resume.

These events are run by Naj N of Program Equity.

Live Coding Session #3: Codespaces

Live Coding Session #2: debugging dev environment setup

Live Coding Session #1: environment setup

Community Talks

Community chat: with Beryl Kanali

Check out our discussion with Beryl on what makes a community. There is a full transcript available as well.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org (*resources*)

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog / dev.to

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Announcements

Timestamps

We would like to thank Daniel Boadzie and Divine Ediebah for their contributions to Data Umbrella by adding timestamps to our YouTube videos MLOps: from Concept to Product and Create a Python Web App Using Shiny.

Call for Volunteers: Video Timestamps

We are looking for assistance in adding video timestamps.

We have instructions on how you can contribute to this project on GitHub. Help us help the community. Pick a video and get started!

Resource: Imposter Syndrome

We hear a lot about “imposter syndrome” in our field. But, what can we do about it? We found this gem of a podcast episode on Building Confidence.

How comfortable are we with our own presence? In this conversation with Selena Rezvani, we explore what it means to “right-size” your confidence, how to get the body on board with feeling more powerful, and what confidence can do for your path ahead.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics. If you or someone you know can speak on these topics, please email us: info@dataumbrella.org

• Open Source Literacy (history, challenges, education or other related topics)

• How to Debug in Python

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

Reproducible Publications with Python and Quarto

July 11, 2023

Quarto is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system that builds on standard markdown with features essential for scientific communication. The system has support for reproducible embedded computations, equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layouts, and more. In this talk we'll explore the use of Quarto with Python, describing both integration with IPython/Jupyter and the Quarto VS Code extension. Users can author Jupyter notebooks or documents as plain text markdowns with code in Python, R, Julia or Observable. Quarto includes the ability to publish high-quality articles, reports, presentations, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, Reveal.js and more.

Machine learning visualization using Yellowbrick

July 25, 2023

Yellowbrick is a very convenient Python library for creating visualizers within the machine learning workflow. With just a few lines of code, a wide range of visualizers can be generated for various stages of the ML process; paying homage to the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In this session, we shall briefly introduce the Yellowbrick library and explore the range of visualizers. Then we shall delve into a practical machine learning classification problem and create classification visualizers using the Yellowbrick library.Save the date for this insightful session!

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Intro to FluxML and Machine Learning in Julia

Julia is a high-level, general-purpose dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science. If you have experience programming in another language, you will find that most of your knowledge will be easily transferred to Julia.

Flux is an elegant approach to machine learning. It's a 100% pure-Julia stack, and provides lightweight abstractions on top of Julia's native GPU and AD support. Flux makes the easy things easy while remaining fully hackable. Learn about the basics of machine learning with FluxML in Julia, how it differs from other frameworks, and why it matters. This presentation will introduce the basics of machine learning with FluxML in Julia, how it differs from other frameworks, and why it matters.

An Introduction to ImageIO

Get ready for an exciting and informative introduction to ImageIO! ImageIO is a popular Python library that offers powerful capabilities for reading and writing images and videos. Together, we'll explore common use cases, best practices, and anti-patterns when using the library. We'll also build intuition for ImageIO’s v3 API, which will allow us to solve complex and non-standard problems. Plus, we'll take a brief look at ImageIO's plugin system, which – among other things – allows tweaking I/O performance. And to top it all off, we'll dive into an end-to-end machine-learning example of how to use ImageIO to train a vision model. So don't miss this chance to expand your knowledge and improve your Python skills with ImageIO.

From Vicuna to human-aligned evaluation

Vicuna is an open-source chatbot trained by fine-tuning LLaMA on user-shared conversations collected from ShareGPT. It is an auto-regressive language model, based on the transformer architecture.

We will talk about the training and deployment experiences of Vicuna, which is a high-quality chat assistant. After training the models, we found evaluating them even more difficult, so we launched Chatbot Arena, a crowd-sourced benchmarking platform featuring randomized battles. However, relying on human evaluation is costly and slow, so we study whether we can replace human evaluators with strong LLMs like GPT-4 for evaluating these models. We termed this approach “LLM-as-a-judge”.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org (*resources*)

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog / dev.to

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective

Announcements

If you are interested in getting your resume reviewed and receiving valuable feedback, join the MLOps Discord server (https://discord.gg/Ud2jRWaKhu), and check out their #career-advice channel. Members can collaborate, share insights, and refine their professional documents to enhance their job prospects.

Call for Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for future webinar topics or speakers? Would you like to speak on a topic? For these and any other suggestions, please complete our Online Suggestion Box.

Call for Contributors

There are various ways to get involved in open source and community. Here are some projects, at all different levels. Contact us if you would like to contribute to any of these projects.

Call for Speakers

We are looking for speakers on the following topics. If you or someone you know can speak on these topics, please email us: info@dataumbrella.org

• Open Source Literacy (history, challenges, education or other related topics)

• How to Debug in Python

Check out Impact

Data Umbrella Impact

Would you like to share an impact that Data Umbrella events and resources have had in your data journey? Send it to us (info@dataumbrella.org), and we will feature it on our Impact Page.

Join our Meetup!

Upcoming Events (free & online webinars)

An Introduction to ImageIO

June 6, 2023

ImageIO is a popular Python library that offers powerful capabilities for reading and writing images and videos. This webinar will explore common use cases, best practices, and anti-patterns when using the library. We will also build intuition for ImageIO’s v3 API, which will allow us to solve complex and non-standard problems. Plus, a brief look at ImageIO's plugin system, which – among other things – allows tweaking I/O performance. And to top it all off, there will be a dive into an end-to-end machine-learning example of how to use ImageIO to train a vision model.

Intro to FluxML and Machine Learning in Julia

June 14, 2023

Julia is a high-level, general-purpose dynamic programming language. Its features are well suited for numerical analysis and computational science. If you have experience programming in another language, you will find that most of your knowledge will be easily transferred to Julia. Refer to the documentation of some noteworthy differences from other popular languages: Matlab, R, Python and C/C++.

Flux is an elegant approach to machine learning. It's a 100% pure-Julia stack, and provides lightweight abstractions on top of Julia's native GPU and AD support. Flux makes the easy things easy while remaining fully hackable. Learn about the basics of machine learning with FluxML in Julia, how it differs from other frameworks, and why it matters.

Recent Events

In case you missed our recent events, the videos have been posted. Subscribe to our Data Umbrella YouTube to receive notifications when the videos premiere.

Solving NLP (Natural Language Processing) Tasks Using LLMs (Large Language Models)

LLMs (Large Language Models) have changed what it means to "do natural language processing", opening up the fields to newcomers and beginners. This talk will present some traditional NLP tasks and how they can be fielded using prompting and tools such as GPT-4. Discussion of open source tools (like OpenChatKit) will also be included.

Create a Python Web App Using Shiny

Shiny makes it easy to build interactive web applications with the power of Python’s data and scientific stack. If you want to develop a python web application you usually need to choose between simple, limited frameworks like Streamlit and more extensible frameworks like Dash. This can cause a lot of problems if you get started with a simple framework but then discover that you need to refactor your application to accommodate the next user request. Shiny for Python differs from other frameworks because it has tremendous range. You can build a small application in a few minutes with the confidence that the framework can handle much more complex problems. In this workshop we will go through the core limitations of Streamlit, and build a Shiny app which avoids those limitations.

MLOps: from Concept to Product

Finding ways to use your data to solve a problem is a great step, which needs to activate a process that allows moving from a Proof of Concept (POC) to a feature or product. Products are meant to be used (obviously) by users who have expectations about their performance, reliability and usability. This process is guided by MLOps practices. In this talk, we will explore what that really means and how you could start applying these practices in real-world scenarios.

Featured Resources

Video Playlists

• Career Advice

• Contributing to Open Source

• Contributing to scikit-learn

• Data Visualization

• Data Science Beginners

• PyMC & NumPy Series

Data Umbrella Resources

• Visit our blog site: blog.dataumbrella.org, and see articles written by our community members on their experience in recent sprints.

• We have a Job Board. You can: post jobs (for free), search jobs, subscribe to a weekly update to see postings.

• Our Data Umbrella YouTube is growing! Subscribe to our channel to receive notifications of when our event videos are posted.

Accessibility Corner

Accessibility Update: Closed Captioning

Our webinars have closed captioning available! This feature makes our live events more accessible to those with hearing needs and for folks in general who like to see the transcript live during presentation to fully process information.

Connect with Us

dataumbrella.org (*resources*)

Job Board

Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)

YouTube (*past recorded talks*)

Twitter: @DataUmbrella

LinkedIn

Blog / dev.to

Facebook & Instagram

Open Collective