Learning Fest was a four-day event for data engineers, data analysts, and machine learning engineers. The event was made up of a series of webinars and live discussions, where our speakers and guest speakers shared their experience and expertise. There were over 20 sessions with topics that range from Leveraging Dashboards with Plotly Dash, Hierarchical Models for Neural Data Analysis, and Workshop in Geospatial 101. The best part? All of the sessions were free and featured some of the most talented minds in the industry!
The goal of Learning Fest is to do our part in contributing to closing the gender gap in technology in LATAM and showcase female talent in different tech related roles. We want to create a space where women feel empowered and inspired to learn more about tech, its role in society and how they can become part of it. We believe that together we will make tech an inclusive environment for all.
Opening Day
Our opening keynote kicked off with our CEO, Israel Niezen, discussing the importance of bringing people together to share ideas and expand our communities. This talk covered what to expect during the 4 day event. One highlight of this event was an important discussion on equality, and how Learning Fest aims to showcase female talent in the data analytics, data engineering and machine learning fields with the hope of addressing the gender gap in technology in Latin America.
After that, Carlos Mendez, Business Operations Manager led a workshop on ‘Polishing your Resume‘. He explained the importance of resumes, including general guidelines on what to include, what not to include, and how to make a good impression to a recruiter.
In addition to these two workshops, we also had ‘Leveraging Dashboards with Plotly Dash’, where Laura Trujillo demonstrated how to take your raw data and turn it into dashboards using Plotly Dash. This session covered the dataset used to create the dashboard, what Dash is and the benefits of using it, the Dashboard created and its functionalities, and the code used as the architecture and logic behind these dashboards.
The day ended with finding confidence in public speaking. Juliana Cardona shared practical tips to improve your public speaking skills. She engaged participants and involved them in a wide range of exercises throughout her talk on how to prepare, organize and deliver a great presentation.
Day Two of Learning Fest
The second day was all about technical talks. We had a series of speakers that covered everything from learning how to tackle an interview to getting started with geospatial data. We also had a murder mystery game where we solved crimes using SQL.
Here’s an overview of the remaining sessions that took place on Day Two of Learning Fest:
- Get Rid of the Hype and Get into Action:
- Ingrid, discussed how to set hype aside and start small with real impactful data projects.
- Databricks: “Lakehouse”
- This session featured Xue Yang, Partner Solutions Architect at Databricks, who introduced Lakehouse and shared real-life examples of data to help solve human problems and illustrated how to build, turn, and deploy your Machine Learning model on Lakehouse end-to-end as a data scientist.
- The MLOps Engineer Role
- A workshop where our speakers, David and Liseth, shared what it means to be an MLOps engineer and how they contribute to the success of their companies.
- Is Dagster The Prince That Was Promised?
- This session explored an in-depth session on Dagster and its features in comparison to other popular orchestration tools.
- Servicing A Machine Learning Model: Writing A FastAPI Application:
- Our speaker, Esteban, shared how you can use FastAPI to build your API layer quickly and easily.
- Subgroup Discovery Introduction for Data Analytics in Fintech
- where Luis presented the basic principles behind subgroup discovery and how it can be used to quickly obtain insights of small subgroups within large datasets applied in the credit environment.
- Hierarchical Models for Neural Data Analysis:
- And finally, Josefina shared her research into developing a statistical modeling framework for combining information from datasets collected in systems neuroscience experiments.
Day Three of Learning Fest
Day three of Learning fest started with a talk on Neural Network Compression by Juan Gutierrez. In his talk, Juan Gutierrez shared the three types of compression and their uses. He gave a good overview of each technique, as well as its benefits and limitations. He also provided a comparison between using each type of model and the uncompressed model. After his lecture, a question and answer session allowed attendees to ask Juan any questions they had left about neural network compression.
The following session, Scaling Python Love with Dask, was hosted by Daniel Sastoque and opened the floor to questions and answers. He walked through what Dask is, how it helps make data analysis faster, why you should use it, and real-life success stories utilizing Dask.
In addition, Storytelling with Data was hosted by Steven Salgado. Steven shared helpful storytelling techniques in order to make the best possible impact on stakeholders in a limited amount of time. He discussed the purpose of Data Analysis and Visualization, with examples of chart selection, decluttering, color, and contrast.
Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning is more important than ever in today’s society. In this final session of the third day of Learning Fest, Ivoline Ngong dives into data privacy and shares various privacy-preserving machine learning methods and different privacy techniques.
Final Day of Learning Fest
Last but not least, we went over some more information about Factored Training Programs and how they work. We also discussed everything you need to know about our recruiting process with our Recruiting Q&A session.
Lots of Interesting Things to Learn About!
The Learning Fest was a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in the industry, as well as network with other developers. There were lots of interesting things to learn about!We hope you enjoyed this recap of our Learning Fest event! If you missed it, don’t worry – you can find most of the recordings on our YouTube channel @factoredAI. To learn more about our Training Programs, please head here. We hope to see you again at our future events!
