2025-04-18 –, Auditorium 3
Lunchtime chat with data science authors, with some offering book giveaways and signing books!
Come meet the authors of some of your favorite data science books, or learn more about a book you're interested in but haven't purchased, yet.
The authors listed below will be available during lunch for informal discussions, so drop in any time during the lunch break for a meet & greet. Some authors will be signing books, so bring your books written by these authors if you want your copy autographed! (And check this schedule again before Friday, as we may have authors joining this session up until the day before the event.) Some limited copies may be available as giveaways.
Will Ayd: Pandas Cookbook, Third Edition (Packt)
Suhas Pai: Designing Large Language Model Applications (O'Reilly)
Renee M. P. Teate: SQL for Data Scientists (Wiley)
Matt Topol: In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow (Packt)
Note that author John Berryman will be presenting a tutorial on Saturday, and will be available during lunchtime on Saturday to chat about his book "Prompt Engineering for LLMs: The Art and Science of Building Large Language Model-Based Applications" (O'Reilly).
No previous knowledge expected
Will Ayd is the author of the Pandas Cookbook, Third Edition, and has served as a maintainer of the pandas project since 2018. Will is also a Committer to the Apache Arrow project, and has helped improve countless more open source data libraries.
In his day job, Will helps clients in the Retail and Apparel spaces optimize cloud data platforms in AWS and GCP, while also providing strategy and training around the use of open source technology in enterprise settings.
Hailing from the faraway land of Brentwood, NY and currently residing in the rolling hills of Connecticut, Matt Topol has always been passionate about software. After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic (now NYU-Poly), he joined FactSet Research Systems, Inc. in 2009 developing financial software. In the time since, Matt has worked in infrastructure and application development, has lead development teams, and architected large-scale distributed systems for processing analytics on financial data. Matt is a PMC member for the Apache Arrow project, frequently enhancing the Golang library among other enhancements and helping to grow the Arrow Community. Recently, Matt wrote the first and only book on Apache Arrow "In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow" and joined Voltron Data in order to work on the Apache Arrow libraries full time and grow the Arrow Golang community.
In his spare time, Matt likes to bash his head against a keyboard, develop/run delightfully demented games of fantasy for his victims--er--friends, and share his knowledge with anyone interested who'll listen to his rants.
Renee Teate is the Senior Director of Data Science at higher ed tech company HelioCampus and author of SQL for Data Scientists (Wiley). Many people know her as the host of the Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast, or as "Data Science Renee" from BlueSky (previously becomingdatasci on Twitter).
Renee lives in Harrisonburg, VA, and is a graduate of JMU and UVA. She has worked with data her entire career, as a database designer, data analyst, data scientist, and director. She enjoys chatting with people looking to "break into" data careers, or looking to build their data science network.
Suhas Pai is a NLP researcher and co-founder/CTO at Hudson Labs, a Toronto based Y-combinator backed startup. He is the author of the book 'Designing Large Language Model Applications', published by O'Reilly Media. He has contributed to the development of several open-source LLMs, including being the co-lead of the Privacy working group at BigScience, as part of the BLOOM LLM project. Suhas is active in the ML community, being Chair of the TMLS (Toronto Machine Learning Summit) conference since 2021. He is also a frequent speaker at AI conferences worldwide, and hosts regular seminars discussing the latest research in the field of NLP.