And we’re off! Day One of AnacondaCON 2018 is officially in the books, y’all. For those of you who couldn’t make the trek to Texas, here are some highlights from what you missed today.
“Why are they shooting at us?” “They’re the IT team!”
The festivities kicked off this morning with a movie trailer for deep learning box office thriller Pyception. We won’t spoil it for you—just watch for yourself!
Announcing Anaconda Data Science Certification
At the conclusion of the trailer, Master of Ceremonies Duane Lawrence welcomed Anaconda CEO Scott Collison to the stage. After providing a brief overview of Anaconda and how Python continues to outpace R for data science work, Scott had the pleasure of making an exciting announcement: we’re officially launching the Anaconda Data Science Certification program! We’re thrilled to partner with DataCamp to establish a state-of-the-art benchmark for what it means to be a data scientist today. Check out our blog post to learn more.
Opening Keynote: Peter Wang
Anaconda CTO & Co-Founder Peter Wang dazzled the crowd with a meme-inspiring opening keynote on the co-evolution of data science, data-driven business, and the open source Python community. Peter set the tone for AnacondaCON 2018 by demonstrating that the spirit of exploration, creativity, and innovation is the beating heart of data science.
Leveraging Recent Advances in Python
David Patschke of Dell Technologies shared a not-so-common feature evaluation method that leverages some recent advances in Python. He demonstrated a methodology called Monte Carlo Permutation Testing (MCPT), and explored using the the ParallelAccelerator functionality within Numba to achieve significant speed advantages. To learn more about how ParallelAccelerator works, check out this blog post from Anaconda’s Stan Seibert.
Using Data Science to Monitor Health
Tim Dobbins, Data Scientist at The General, took things to a personal level by showing us Achoo, which uses a Raspberry Pi to predict if Tim’s son will need his inhaler on any given day using weather, pollen, and air quality data. If the prediction for a given day is above a specified threshold, the Pi will email both Tim and the school nurse, notifying her that he may need preemptive treatment.
Packaging Like a Pro
Mahmoud Hashemi, Principal Engineer at SimpleLegal, guided us on an engaging journey of building production-grade packages with Anaconda. Mahmoud covered the art of using conda and conda envs in industrial settings, drawing from his own real-world experiences.
Leveraging Anaconda Enterprise to Reduce Costs
Big thanks to Will Collins for hopping across the pond to tell us how National Grid is building a risk-based framework to effectively manage its Electricity Transmission assets. Will described how National Grid’s Analytics team has leveraged the Anaconda Enterprise data science platform to reduce costs and increase reliability of energy delivery.
AnacondaCON Sponsors
And finally, a huge shout-out to our awesome sponsors: DataCamp, Dremio, NVIDIA, Full Spectrum Analytics, NumFOCUS, Intel, General Assembly, and Microsoft. We wouldn’t be here without you.
We couldn’t have asked for a better first day. Stay tuned for more!
