We are glad to announce our first ABCD talk (A-mazing BC D-ata Science talk... we are still working on the acronym!). This event will be in line with the topic of our DS Community for this quarter: Natural Language Processing!

We are hoping that this is just the first of many exciting talks and events to come. It will be a great occasion to meet up with our fellow Data Scientists, Engineers, Product teams, and any other BC professional with a strong curiosity for Data Science and AI.

The program:

16:45 Ice-breaker

17:00 Intro and flash talks presenting some of the Data Science teams of our community:

• Oliver Turnbull / Rob Deans (Instrumental)
• Basil Woods / TJ Mabugane (AVADO)
• Michael Chan / McCall Milligan (Researcher / fospha)
• Sepanda Pouryahya (fospha)
• Jonny Hawkins (Liberis)
• Andreas Vrahimis / Ehsan Faridifar (Salary Finance)

17:35 Break

17:50 Keynote speaker, Alex Darmon: "Punctuation: an often overlooked signal in Natural Language Processing"

18:20 Chit chat with your fellow Data Scientists.

A few notes on our featured talk:

Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favourite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em-dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures not only in word choice and grammar, but also in punctuation itself. Indeed, visual sequences of punctuation from different authors produce marvellously different (and visually striking) sequences. Punctuation is a largely overlooked stylistic feature in "stylometry'', the quantitative analysis of written text. In this paper, we examine punctuation sequences in a corpus of literary documents and ask the following questions: Are the properties of such sequences a distinctive feature of different authors? Is it possible to distinguish literary genres based on their punctuation sequences? Do the punctuation styles of authors evolve over time? Are we on to something interesting in trying to do stylometry without words, or are we full of sound and fury (signifying nothing)?

And last but not least, get to know our guest speaker, Alex Darmon:

After a master in Computer Science and Applied math in France, Alex completed a master in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at Oxford. Eager to apply her knowledge to concrete problems in a challenging environment, she joined the start up world within Blenheim Chalcot, first at Fusetech (known as Researcher) and then at Fospha. While gaining an extensive experience in the industry, she has carried on her research on her free time. Her topic of interest is focused on NLP and specifically stylometry of authors. She has been analysing a widely overlooked signal: punctuation.