What tools do you need to bring to a DataDive? The next DataKind UK DataDive is taking place in two weeks time in London. I took part in one of the previous DataDives and I would highly recommend the experience for anyone with data science or analytical skills who wants to help charities use their data.

The DataDives take place over the course of a weekend and in that time you have to decide on a charity to work with, understand their data and goals, perform your analysis and present your results in a usable form. That’s a lot to get through in just over two days so it’s very important to be able to get up and running quickly with the analysis. I thought it might be useful to list the software and tools that I will be packing in my DataDive toolbelt this time around.

It looks like this is going to be a busy week. First up Noelle Sio, Alexander Kagoshima and I are presenting a webinar on Tuesday about our traffic analysis and prediction work. We talked about this topic at Strata Santa Clara but this webinar will take an extended look at the data, the challenges and the technology we used. You can sign up on the Pivotal website and the recording will be available afterwards.

View of London from Level 39, the venue for PyData in Canary Wharf Last weekend the first European PyData event took place in London’s Canary Wharf. Having been really impressed with the last conference in New York in November, I was really looking forward to having PyData closer to home. With lots of great talks on subjects from Machine Learning to Pharmaceutical drug discovery, the weekend did not disappoint. Ian Ozsvald has written up a good description of all the different activities.

The next few weeks are going to be busy and one of the reasons is that I am fortunate enough to be speaking at this year’s Santa Clara edition of Strata. Alexander Kagoshima, Noelle Sio and I are talking in the Machine Data session on Thursday 13th February about “Driving the Future of Smart Cities - How to Beat the Traffic”. It’s the last parallel talk of the day, so perfect timing for figuring out how to navigate the Bay Area traffic on the way home.

I have been using the Python data ecosystem (consisting of NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, and many more) for a few years now, so I was really glad to be able to attend the conference dedicated to all things Python data related, PyData, in its latest incarnation in New York last November. PyData has been running roughly three times a year since 2012 when the first event was held in the Google Campus in Mountain View.

At a London Cosmology Discussion Meeting last week, representatives of the London cosmology groups discussed ways of increasing collaboration and cooperation between the groups and how to utilize the various skills in London in a more coherent way. One of the main outcomes of this meeting was a consensus to form a ‘virtual’ institute to act as an umbrella organisation for the collaboration efforts. This London Institute of Cosmology would initially act as a clearing house for event information, especially seminars in the groups, information about research visitors to London, and provide a structure for possible funding applications.

Last weekend I took part in the first London DataDive, a charitable event organised by DataKind, who previously organised similar events across the US. The basic premise is that charities have collected large amounts of data, on donors, fund-raising and the actual care, help or interventions they provide. Without costly analysts to sort through and make sense of the data, it goes unused, providing little or no value to the organisation.