PyData Pittsburgh June Event Recap
Thank you to the over 60 folks who joined us at CMU last night!
Thank you again to the over 60 folks who joined us at the CMU Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship last night for PyData Pittsburgh’s June event! I thought our community’s first event since hosting the PyCon US conference in Pittsburgh was a big success. Read on for a recap and links to slides and other relevant resources.
The Talks
The event last night featured two talks:
I kicked things off with a lightning talk summarizing the research paper Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet from Anthropic. My slides are available here.
Rorry Brenner presented the main talk, Updating the Neuroscience Behind Artificial Intelligence, in which he described a novel method for boosting both the accuracy and efficiency of neural network models by adding “artificial dendrites”, an innovation inspired by a richer understanding of how biological neurons work. Rorry’s slides are available here.
For anyone who’s interested in learning more about Rorry’s deep learning methodology and potentially giving it a try in your own PyTorch models, you can visit Perforated AI on the web or reach out to Rorry via email at rorry@perforatedai.com.
📸 Share Your Pictures
Did you get any good pictures from the event last night? We’d love to see them! Feel free to share them with us directly by responding to this email, or post them on your online platforms of choice.
If you share them on LinkedIn, Mastodon, or Twitter, be sure to tag the PyData Pittsburgh account!
Financially Supporting PyData Pittsburgh
Do you appreciate PyData Pittsburgh’s event series and want to support the work we’re doing? Now you can! Last night, we announced that PyData Pittsburgh is now able to accept financial contributions from individuals and organizations. Click here to learn more:
We qualify as a 501(c)(3) public charity, which means donations to PyData Pittsburgh are tax-deductible and may be eligible for employer-matching programs for charitable contributions.
Several people have already made generous donations since last night — thank you!
Call for Proposals
Do you have an idea for a talk or panel discussion at a future PyData Pittsburgh event? Consider submitting your idea to our Call for Proposals!
We’re always looking for speakers from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels. You don’t have to have invented your own deep learning algorithm, like Rorry. You could give a lightning talk about an interesting research paper you just read, like I did. Or you could give a tutorial explaining a new modeling methodology you learned, or demonstrating new features in a software library you use for work.
If you’d like to learn more or discuss potential event ideas, you can simply reply to this email.
The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship
We’d like to extend a big thank-you to Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship for hosting us in their excellent space. If you’d like to learn more about the Swartz Center’s other programs and events, please visit their website and consider signing up for their weekly newsletter!
Pittsburgh Startup News
Pittsburgh Startup News published a nice write-up about our event last night:
If you’re interested in news and events in the startup ecosystem and tech scene in Pittsburgh more generally, Pittsburgh Startup News is a great resource!