Brussels Data Science Community

Last bits of info to convince your friends to participate to the HIVHACK.

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The volunteers prepared an impressive dataset for us !  Over the past 6 months they organised 17 activities with over 350 attendants in order to be ready for the HIVHACK that will start Friday and  end Saturday. This #data4good initiative is driven by the AI & Data Science Community of Belgium supported by Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health. Their main request to you is:  Join us … because we can use some extra brains to save the world from HIV.

Your Mission Should You Choose to accept it … is to build a solution that can be used by local data experts to map out areas of high drug resistance prevalence.

You will be part of a global effort composed of 100 hackers & 15 coaches. There will be about 15 teams created on the first day.

The winning team will go to Africa and train the local data experts to use their solution. Teach them how to fish and help them to build a local sustainable datalab.

In case you need some supporting material to convince your friends to join,  here is some interesting information about the Hack:

We had an excellent reach too with all the activities we organised:

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So the dices are rolling, rien ne va plus, place your bets and tell your friends to join the effort and to do something good, ask them to register on hivhack.org.

and share this announcement and make some noise using #HIVHACK !

See you Friday 13:00 at Digitsyer,

 

Philippe

Use your skills to fight the spread of HIV drug resistance

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join the fight

This Friday 23rd at 13:00 we will hack our way into the HIV drug resistance problem.

HIV drug resistance is a problem that every person on therapy will eventually face. It can sometimes develop on its own after years of treatment or, more commonly, when a person fails to take the drugs as prescribed.

Following the massive increase of people on treatment (from less than 800 000 in 2000 to more than 18 millions in 2016), a non-negligible rise in the prevalence of resistant HIV strains has emerged and threatens the global commitment to end the HIV epidemic by 2030.

If no action is taken now, and this problem left unaddressed, HIV Drug Resistance could lead to a new crisis in the HIV epidemic.

Through this data4good hackathon we will get an understanding of epidemiological and non-epi factors influencing the emergence of HIV-DR and a model mapping the spots. This will result in dynamic and up-to-date graphical and visual representations of HIV-DR maps allowing governments, health workers and other stakeholders to be informed on the topic and to turn the understanding of the drivers into actionable items in the prevention and countering of HIV-DR. As part of our mission we intend to educate on the approach and outcomes locally.

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About the HIVHACK :

We are happy to invite you to our yearly data4good hackathon that will be held at DigitYser.

more info: hivhack.org

date: November 23 & 24th

How to participate:

You can register as a team or register individually. We have prepared different use cases to allow you to jump onto an existing idea or you can develop your own idea.

We are also looking for additional technical coaches and some jury members, so if you have some time to spare for a good cause on Saturday please call me.

How to register:

Registration for individuals are Free.

If you want to register your team up to 5 people using your company name you can also.

If you are already a partner and you want to use your 50% voucher, please use this link

Your Invitation for the #datascience Jobfairs on 15/11 and 20/12 + HIVHACK + First Anniversary Celebration

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Dear community member,

Here is your personal invitation for 4 data related events and also some information about the JobFair that you could share with your recruitment team.

About the JobFair:

The data science community is organising 2 jobfairs in order to present our datascience bootcampers that will be available in a few weeks.

more info: di-academy.com/job-fair/

dates: November 15th & December 20th (followed by the first anniversary celebration)


How to register:

  • If you want to test out what the community has to offer we invite you for free, please use this link to register to the next jobfair on Thursday 15th November.
  • If you are already a partner and you want to use your 50% voucher, please use this link .

 

About the HIVHACK :

We are happy to invite you to our yearly data4good hackathon that will be held at DigitYser.

more info: hivhack.org

date: November 23 & 24th


How to participate:

You can register as a team or register individually. We have prepared different use cases to allow you to jump onto an existing idea or you can develop your own idea.

We are also looking for additional technical coaches and some jury members, so if you have some time to spare for a good cause on saturday please call me.


How to register:

Registration for individuals are Free.

If you want to register your team up to 5 people using your company name you can also.

If you are already a partner and you want to use your 50% voucher, please use this link

 

About our first year anniversary celebration:

You are kindly invited to join us to celebrate the first anniversary of DigitYser.

more info: celebrate year1

date: December 20th 18:30

Registration is Free

 

Kind regards,

Philippe Van Impe

 

Here are the 8 Real Challenges Data Scientists Face by Laurence Bradford

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Here are the 8 Real Challenges Data Scientists Face by

Laurence Bradford

Laurence Bradford

1. You’ll Need To Be A Specialist, Not A Generalist
2. Understand The Business Reasons Informing Your Choices
3. It’s Best To Have Cross-Department Expertise
4. Explain Technical Concepts To Non-Technical Audiences
5. You’ll Spend A Lot Of Time With Raw Data
6. Collaboration Is Key (You Won’t Work In A Vacuum)
7. Be Flexible And Consider Context
8. Regular Maintenance And Version Control Is Essential

LINK TO THE ARTICLE: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurencebradford/2018/09/06/8-real-challenges-data-scientists-face/

Welcome to the 4th edition of the DISUMMIT

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DIS_2018_LOGO

Each year, the diSummit brings members of Data Science communities together to explore the potential value of recent breakthroughs & best practices to business.

The Summit is a community event, where everything is provided for you to connect with the best, and network with your peers.

Our philosophy is “No bullshit or false hopes”

DiS18_Speakers_Philippe van Impe

 

“We scraped away the marketing noise, ignored the projects done outside of Europe and ended up with a conference that is all about practical business outcome, #AI Breakthroughs, best practices, and business transformation.”

 

It is up to you to make the best of your day. You can meet inspiration listening to the Ignite talks, boost your technical skills in the hands-on workshops, dissect successful AI projects in our master classes, find interesting new job opportunities at the Job Fair and meet experts that can implement the most advanced solutions in the Partner Village.

In the coming 3 years, we are going to put Belgium on the fast track of #AI with the “AI-Hub” program. Our aim is to deliver more value to the sector and participate in European initiatives to drive a Responsible #AI. Let’s make the world a better place using #datascience!

You are an essential part of Belgium’s AI Hub. there is no time to waste and there are no more excuses because we now have :

  • Data science communities in most major Belgian universities
  • amazing partners supporting us
  • training programs to boost competence in #AI  
  • A large #AI clubhouse in the center of Brussels for workshops, bootcamps, trainings and meetups
  • A second big data4good project to work deliver called “HIVHACK.org”

Enjoy this inspirational day, thank you for being here, use #AI in a more responsible way, and see you tonight at the BBQ with the best beers of Brussels!

Philippe Van Impe
+32 477 23 78 42
philippe@digityser.org
disummit.com
@pvanimpe

PS:  Use the bot to connect with your peers and use  #DISUMMIT when share your thoughts on social media.

all covers-speakers_UPDATED.ppt

Highlights of diSummit 2018

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Looking at the quality of this year’s speakers and the number of tickets sold,  it looks like the #DISUMMIT is becoming the “annual conference of the European #AI ecosystem “

Here is the success formula:

  1. diSummit is organised together with Icity.brussels at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. We expect 800 participants.
  2. The event is the annual conference of the #datascience community grouping all the related meetups like Data Science Community (Brussels, Liège, Antwerp, Ghent, Leuve),  R-ladies, #AI meetup …
  3. It is a Team event where companies send out their teams to update their skills and to get some inspiration.
  4. All the stakeholders of the #AI ecosystem are participating:
     Academic – Political – Communities – Start-ups – SME – Big Corporates:

    1. CxO of top startups like Collibra or Digital Genius
    2. #AI Think thanks from different countries ( Hub France #AI , Vlaanderen AI , UK )
    3. Top universities present with speakers and workshops (Monreal, KUL, ULB, VUB …)
    4. Passionate speakers with less experience in the Ingnite talk sessions
  5. Lots Networking is organised to allow everyone to connect with the right people of the industry.
  6. Companies recruiting are present at the Jobfair to meet the experts and the young graduates that wil be present.
  7. At the Partner Village companies looking for solutions can talk to the real experts
  8. Inspiring day geared around learning and sharing
    1. Over 50 presentations in the plenary
    2. Master Classes for the managers in the break outs
    3. Hands-on sessions for the nerds in the break outs
  9. There is a very exclusive speakers’ dinner hosted by Prof. Hugues Bersini on June 20th.
  10. And at the end the day there is a BBQ with the best craft beers of Brussels

It is the 4th edition and all previous editions were sold out.
Please don’t forget to forward this to your teams and recruiting experts because you can still book a booth at the JobFair or in the Partner Village.

Key Figures about the event:

  • 7 parallel session – 1 auditorium for 800p and 6 classrooms for 60p
  • 800 participants coming from the entire #AI ecosystem
  • 50 Presentations
  • 10 Master Classes
  • 10 Hands-on workshops
  • 50 companies recruiting

More information:  disummit.com
Check out the videos.  

 

#DISUMMIT – #machinelearning to improve ranking system of schools by Fritz Schiltz

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DiS18_Speakers_Fritz SchiltzPresenting Fritz Schiltz our youngest speaker of #disummit – he will talk about using #machinelearning to improve the ranking system of schools.

Fritz is an applied econometrician at the University of Leuven where he applies advanced analytics to evaluate policies, mainly in education. He has worked on reports for the European Union, the Ministry of Education and Syntra. Halfway his PhD in Economics he shifted his interests towards machine learning methods. His presentation is the result from joint work with the Bank of Italy and illustrates how machine learning or AI methods can be used to improve school rankings using an Italian dataset.

Machine learning methods can be used to improve the assessment of school quality. School rankings based on value-added (VA) estimates are subject to prediction errors, since VA is defined as the difference between predicted and actual scores of students. More accurate predictions result in more informative school rankings, and better policies. We introduce a more flexible random forest (RF), rooted in the machine learning literature, to minimize prediction errors and to improve school rankings. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the advantages of this approach. Applying the proposed method to administrative data on Italian middle schools indicates that school rankings are sensitive to prediction errors, even when extensive controls are added.

 

#DISUMMIT – PN Schwab – Data Sovereignty

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DiS18_Speakers_Pierre-Nicolas SchwabAt the 2017 Data Innovation Summit I highlighted the need to take ethics into account when designing algorithms (see also the first meetup we organized at DigitYser with the help of Philippe on this topic). This was my priority at RTBF and has been one of my main area of work at European level as chairman of the Big Data Initiative of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). This priority seems nowadays to be shared by many and I’m pleased to see that the situation has improved a lot in the last months. I’ll start my 2018 keynote at the Data Innovation Summit with some concrete examples before moving on the next big challenge (and the topic of my 2018 talk): Data Sovereignty.

I first coined this term during a keynote speech I gave earlier this year to RTBF employees in an attempt to raise their awareness on why we need to become less dependent of internet traffic referral sites like Google and Facebook. I further explained my vision in this article.
Data sovereignty is especially crucial for media websites which rely too much on on Google and Facebook. Some fellow members of the European Broadcasting Union have seen their traffic badly hit after Facebook and Google changed their algorithms, revealing our overall dependency to these third-party ecosystems.
At the 2018 Data Innovation Summit I’ll give some astonishing examples of this dependency and will explain the RTBF strategy and what we have done in the last 12 months to achieve our goal: becoming more data-independent and building a sustainable and bright long-term future for our organization.
Besides explaining the steps we undertook to realize this, I will also share with you the message I gave to the members of the EBU Big Data Initiative and the “state of the union” as far as data independency is concerned.

I hope to see you in Brussels on 27 June and to share ideas with you on those important topics.

Pierre-Nicolas Schwab is the founder of market research agency IntoTheMinds
He has been Big Data manager at RTBF (Belgium) since 2016 and was elected chairman of the Big Data Initiative of the European Broadcasting Union (Switzerland) in 2017.

Invite your team to #DISUMMIT on 27/6

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#DISUMMIT :  First Team Packs have been ordered !

team pack 8

Here is one of the analytic teams who is going to spend a full day at the Université libre de Bruxelles to find some inspirations for their next #AI project.

You should invite your team too,

get inspired from over 40 presentations, benefit from the master classes & hands-on workshops, do loads of networking and end off with a BBQ in the Beergarden. 

Order the team pack now and join us on June 27th for the annual conference of the data science community. 

team-pack-infoteam-pack

more info on disummit.com

7th Data Science Leuven Meetup – 29/5

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Details

Well, well, well, I bet some of you didn’t expect a DSL meetup in May anymore. Ha! That’s where some of you were wrong! We are sorry that it took so long but we can finally announce a meetup on the 29th of May. We have one confirmed speaker already. More to follow!

7pm: Doors

7.30pm:
– Mike Friendman (Solvay) – The value of HR Analytics
– Maarten Weyn (Professor UA) – Send Time optimization in smart city sensors using distributed algorithms
– Speaker 3

9pm: Beers (STUKcafé, Naamsestraat 96, 3000 Leuven)

 

Register Here