Thanks again for joining Charlottesville Data Science for our September event
It was a great event — even if it wasn't the one we'd planned!
Thanks again to everyone who joined Charlottesville Data Science last week for our September event! It turned out to be a great evening, even if the content wasn’t what we’d originally planned.
Patrick kicked things off with a lightning talk exploring a fascinating line of research from the team at Anthropic about how modern large language models internally represent and work with sophisticated real-world concepts. Patrick’s slides are available here. The full publication on which his talk was based is Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet. It’s worth a read!
John Elder followed with the talk The Twin Crises of Science — and How to Defeat Them. John’s talk (1) described how scientific research in both academic and commercial settings can go awry surprisingly often, and (2) introduced a method, Target Shuffling, that better estimates the true significance of scientific findings, leading to increased trust and adoption of the results. His slides are available here.
We know many of our group members were excited about our original talk for this event, Ditch the Anxiety, Make Bold Moves, and Design Your Meaningful Tech Career. We look forward to getting it back on the schedule soon!
Community Announcements
New Group Alert! Our friends at Charlottesville R Users are hosting their first event on Wednesday, September 24 from 6-7:30pm at the UVA School of Data Science. Whether you’re an R user or just R-curious, check them out! Hit the button below for more information about their mailing list, Discord server, and events calendar.
Save the date: It isn’t posted online yet, but our October Charlottesville Data Science event is coming up on Thursday, October 9, also at the UVA School of Data Science. The topic will be AI coding agents for data scientists and data science workflows. Stay tuned for more information!
Have an idea for a future Charlottesville Data Science event? Consider submitting it to the Charlottesville Data Science Call for Proposals! All of our presentations come from members of the community. You could be next!
Finally, thanks again to Vault Virginia for hosting our event last week and for being a Charlottesville Data Science supporter for years. If you work remotely, are self-employed, or otherwise work from home, check them out! They recently launched a new “creator hub” membership, which includes access to facilities for podcast recording, video production, music production, and more.