[2024.04] Data Umbrella Newsletter: April 2024
We organize data science events for the community.
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
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
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
Meetup: Data Umbrella & Data Umbrella Africa (*upcoming events*)
YouTube (*past recorded talks*)