February Event Recap and Community Announcements
Thank you to the 75 folks who joined us at the Allegheny Observatory last week!
Thank you again to the over 75 folks who joined us last week for PyData Pittsburgh’s Machine Learning in Astronomy event at the Allegheny Observatory!
Ashod Khederlarian, a 4th-year Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh, delivered a standing-room-only talk about how researchers use machine learning techniques to analyze vast astronomical datasets, including detecting gravitational waves, estimating the vast distances to faraway galaxies, and building 3D models of the universe.
After Ashod’s talk, staff members led PyData Pittsburgh attendees on a private tour of the Observatory, including the impressive Fitz-Clark and Thaw refractor telescopes, which were some of the largest telescopes in the world when they were constructed. So many people turned out we had to split up into three groups to do the tour!
Thanks again to the the Allegheny Observatory, its staff members, and volunteers for being wonderful hosts.
Community Announcements
PyData Virginia 2025 will be held April 18-19 in Charlottesville, Virginia. PyData Virginia is now the closest major PyData conference to Pittsburgh. (Full disclosure: I’m serving as the conference chair!) We expect the conference to bring together data scientists, software engineers, researchers, and technology leaders from across the Mid-Atlantic to share ideas and learn from each other about the latest developments in open-source data science, AI, and machine learning.
Conference passes are on sale — get yours while they’re still availabe!
PyCon US 2025 will be held May 14-18 right here in Pittsburgh, and the conference schedule is now available. PyCon US is the largest and longest-running annual gathering in the world for the users and developers of the Python programming language. It was held in Pittsburgh in 2024, and it’s coming back for an encore in 2025.
Stay tuned for more announcements about PyCon US 2025 and the local community soon!
JuliaCon 2025 will be held July 21-26 in Pittsburgh. JuliaCon is the largest annual gathering for the users and developers of the Julia programming language. Julia may not be as widely known as Python, but it’s heavily used in scientific computing, especially in academia. It’s one of the three programming languages specifically included in the PyData community, alongside Python and R.
We look forward to seeing you again at future PyData Pittsburgh events!