by Robert Wiltshire, Tech Cornwall Youth Programme Coordinator
Wednesday evening saw the first proper meetup of PyData Cornwall. Led by Tun Schwe, Fei Phoon and Kevin Bath, who also hosted the evenings meeting. We all gathered at the offices of Flowmoco in Newquay for an informal get together and evening of stimulating talks. And pizza. And drinks. And more pizza.
Our hosts welcomed everyone to the event and the hope is to build it into a regular gathering of developer, or should that be developing?, minds. We were engaged with two talks and a couple of quick lightning talks to finish off the evening. And the pizza.
Benjamin Gamble had travelled down from Cambridge for the meetup. Well he admitted that the family had also come along too. For the week. All enjoying the delights of Newquay and the surroundings. Ben enthralled us on how he developed a way to create stories with AI that did not loose their way due to the limitations of AI memory for characters and events. If I get this right, he literally took story telling apart into the components and then gets the AI to just understand who and what everything is and what it has been doing. No strange characters joining in for no apparent reasons and spoiling the thread of the tale.
Suyash beguiled us with a magic trick to break the ice then demonstrated the power of a database that can track information in near real time. The nuances of this were over the head of this audience member but I can see that handling huge amounts of time sensitive data is important in the right instances.
Tariq Rashid was the first lightning talk about how using modern tech approaches to finding hidden properties in data isn’t always the best idea. Using Cygnus X-3, an interstellar X-Ray source, as the example he showed what happens when modern methods are used to clean the data to reveal any trends. Eventually he revealed how an older method removed the cloak that was hiding the fact that Cygnus X-3 is a two star system with an orbital period of 4.7 days. If you are an astronomy geek then this is interesting stuff. Particularly when he was only the second person to know this as a co-discoverer.
To wrap up the evening I gave a brief recounting of the Tech Cornwall visit and talk at SXSW London a few weeks ago. How the South West went to SXSW to demonstrate how we are changing the talent gap in Cornwall. An interesting experience revealing how a really large conference over a large area is run. But I felt a disappointing experience when trying to learn what AI is or will be used for. It was more about what shouldn’t be done with it and what to look out for.
The evening ended with conversations, beers and the last of the pizza. Did I mention there was pizza?
