Day 4 of PyCon 2023

Last day of PyCon. Again I got there early for the lightning talks and the keynote. The keynote today was by Margaret Mitchell who is a researcher who is interested in the intersection between machine learning and ethics. Her specialties are natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics. She currently works for Hugging Face as a Chief Ethics Scientist. Previously, she worked at Google AI, where she founded and co-led Google's Ethical AI group. She has also worked at Microsoft Research, focusing on computer vision-to-language generation, and at Johns Hopkins, focusing on Bayesian modeling and information extraction.

Her talk was very relevant in light of the current climate of generative models. There were several talks in the conference on issues regarding machine learning bias, but she brought up some examples that I'm sure most people there had not seen or thought of before and the need for organizations to "operationalize ethical data development" and just as data scientists put effort into evaluating their models to also put effort into evaluating their data sources for bias, representation, and ethical uses.

Some of the talks I went to today:

• "Supercharging Pipeline Efficiency with ML Performance Prediction"
• "Getting Around the GIL: Parallelizing Python for Better Performance"
• "An Overview of the Python Code Tool Landscape 2023"

The session "An Overview of the Python Code Tool Landscape 2023" was by
Al Sweigart. I am a big fan of his. He has written many books on Python and I've watched him many times live code on Twitch. Probably his most well known book is Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
(https://automatetheboringstuff.com/).

He's also a great speaker. He went through many of the coding tools out there, but in the end he said you could get away with just having Black, mypy, and Ruff. Ruff is a new package that replaces many of the old tools. It's written in Rust and is incredibly fast https://github.com/charliermarsh/ruff.

I also used this last day as an opportunity to walk around Salt Lake City and take some pictures:

The last talk was by Guido van Rossum - the creator of Python. Since this was the 20th anniversary of PyCon, he gave us the history of Pycon from it's earliest difficult inception to its present day.

And that wrapped up the last day of PyCon for me. Next year it will be in Pittsburgh and I'm already looking forward to it.