PyData Pittsburgh November Event Recap and Community Announcements
Thank you to everyone who braved the storm to join us!
Thank you to everyone who braved the wind, rain, and possibly tornadoes to join us last night for our Data Science for Mental Health Crises event! It was great to see a full house despite the weather.
Pim Welle delivered an excellent talk highlighting the work his data science team at the Allegheny County Department of Human Services is doing to better understand the risks and patient outcomes associated with involuntary commitments, also known as 302s. Pim described how his team has:
Developed machine learning models to predict which individual patients are at the greatest risk of experiencing a variety of negative outcomes following a 302, and
Devised sophisticated causal inference techniques to rigorously estimate the overall effect of 302s on poor patient outcomes.
Throughout the talk, our audience peppered Pim with a barrage of insightful questions. Pim probably spent as much time engaging with our community members’ queries as he did presenting his prepared material!
This research will appear in a forthcoming academic paper, which we’ll be sure to share when it’s available! In the meantime, the 2023 report Pim referenced in his talk is available here:
Analysis of Allegheny County’s Involuntary Hospitalization (302) Program
Community Announcements
PyData Global 2024 is December 3-5. PyData Global is a three-day, all-online conference featuring presentations from data scientists, data engineers, and developers of data analysis tools from around the world. The schedule will feature dozens of talks and tutorials about data science, machine learning, AI, and working with LLMs. Tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis.
PyCon US 2025 will be held May 14-18 right here in Pittsburgh, and the Call for Proposals is now open. 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. PyCon US 2025 is currently seeking proposals for Talks, Charlas (Spanish-language content), Tutorials, and Posters.
PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh was excellent — but if I have one regret about it, it’s that when the biggest Python conference in the world was in Pittsburgh, there were very few speakers from Pittsburgh featured on stage. We should change that in 2025. I’d encourage folks in our community to submit a proposal for a talk, tutorial, or poster session, and encourage your friends and colleagues to, too! The deadline to submit proposals for PyCon US 2025 is December 19.
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 explicitly included in the PyData community, alongside Python and R. Stay tuned for more on JuliaCon 2025.
Searching for Pittsburgh’s next great Python, data science, and AI community leaders
After three years at the helm, I’ll be stepping down as the lead organizer for PyData Pittsburgh in mid-2025. I’d love to spend the next several months handing off leadership of the community to a new team of organizers who want to keep it vibrant and growing in a new chapter.
Organizing local data science communities has been extremely rewarding for me, both personally and professionally. I know of no better way to build your professional network. Many of the significant turning points in my career have come from connections I’ve made through organizing and speaking at technology community events.
If you fall into one of these categories, I think this might be an especially good opportunity for you (I know because I’ve been all three!):
A graduate student or early-career professional looking to build your network and establish yourself as a leader
A data team leader looking to find great people for your team and build its reputation in the community
An independent consultant working in data science, data engineering, or ML/AI
With all the major events coming up and companies regularly announcing new investments in Pittsburgh, 2025 and beyond should be a golden age for the Python, data science, and ML/AI community here. If you’re interested in potentially taking on a bigger role with helping run PyData Pittsburgh moving forward, please don’t hesitate to reach out! You can simply reply to this email.