Firstly some housekeeping: there’s no MPUG meeting this month. The next meeting will be on March 4, 6pm at Inspire 9.
The February meeting was moved to January 28 to avoid a clash with Tim Berners-Lee visiting town. Unfortunately the new meeting time clashed with LCA and the Australia Day weekend, which meant a number of people, including myself, couldn’t make it.
In lieu of not posting anything about the Jan/Feb meeting, here is the continuation of my notes from the December 2012 meeting.
Ed Schofield from Python Charmers spoke on 10 cool things about Python:
- Inline plotting in IPython – in a “notebook” in a web browser or the Qt console
- IPython interfaces – R & Cython as well “magic” interfaces
- The collections module in the Python standard library
- dict and set comprehensions
- %pdb magic in IPython
- The Pandas library
- For data analysis and modelling
- Came out of the hedge fund industry
- DataFrame object for manipulating data
- Excellent support for working with CSV, SQL, Excel files
- Inbuilt support for pivot tables
- The requests library: “HTTP for humans”
- WeasyPrint – ACID2-compliant HTML and CSS rendering to PDF
- Really cool!
- Uses “print” CSS for formatting
- scikit.learn – a general purpose machine learning library for Python
- The Python ecosystem in general
Lars from 99 Designs spoke about Eigenface in analysing logo designs:
- Eigenface: uses eigenvectors for recognition
- Using PCA (Principal Components Analysis) from scikit.learn
- Some interesting techniques that could be used across a range of image recognition/analysis domains