#40 Paris Women in Machine Learning & Data Science: Machine Learning Readiness, Anomaly Detection, and Energy Emergency Measures for Winter
Difficult to believe, but we have met for our 40th meetup. From the modest origins back in 2017, the community has grown to over 4600 members, and counting.
To celebrate this milestone, we met on Thursday 1 December 2022, at Datadog office in downtown Paris, with Marie Sacksick welcoming the guests and Natalie Cernecka moderating.
She reminded the audience the WiMLDS Paris mission and history, and explained our objectives and activities.
She also announced the special meetup we are preparing for the end of the year, which will be inaugural meetup of WiMLDS Kyiv, the latest WiMLDS chapter, launched in October.
We are organising this event online, on 20 December 2022, together with WiMLDS Poznan, as we believe it is important to support Ukrainian data science community.
WiMLDS is not a political organisation, it is a professional association. But, in these dark times, we cannot simply stand by. In WiMLDS Paris we believe it is our civic duty to support Ukraine.
Back in May, we listed some initiatives, such as Science for Ukraine, which matches Ukrainian researchers and students with open academic positions, scholarships, and grants, or this Sifted article listing multiple ways how the tech community can help Ukraine, including donating, volunteering, and offering jobs and relocation.
Additional resources on how you can help Ukraine can be found here, and here. Alternatively, talk to Ukrainians in your professional network, they will point you to other ways to help.
Back to our meetup. We used our traditional format of three talks: one from industry, one from academia, and the third on a broader topic of women, technology, and society.
The first speaker represented our host, Datadog: Anne-Marie Tousch, Senior Data Scientist. Her talk was entitled “On Machine Learning Readiness”.
She began by recalling what is called Machine Learning and what are the differences with classic software, and continued with practical guidelines on how to integrate Machine Learning models in production. With a great insight to take away: although ML is trendy, you might not need it at all to meet your needs. It is also useful to have a first baseline based on classic software.
If you want to know more, check out her slides below.
The second speaker was Dr Silvia Metelli, Marie Skołodowska-Curie Individual Fellow. Her talk was entitled “New edge prediction and anomaly-detection in large computer networks”.
She presented her work on an incredible dataset: it contains netflow data (id est between ips), qualified by the timing, the protocol, the duration, etc., and authentication data. The dataset covers 58 days, with 1 second resolution: it’s huge!
We used to have detection system where we try to detect a specific attack, but now attackers always invent novel attack patterns. Therefore it’s more reliable and secure to have an anomaly detection in your network.
If you want to know more, check out her slides below.
The thirds speaker was Sophie Diakhate, Electric Engineer and Energy and Utilities Consultant at Yélé. Her talk was entitled “Emergency plan to secure winter: what are the measures set up by RTE?”.
Winter is coming, and France is bracing itself for the challenge of securing energy supplies.
Sophie presented various data on energy production and consumption: how much, for what sector, and at what time of the day. For instance, did you know that house heater is responsible for more than 20% of the electricity consumption on cold days?
The goal for RTE is to guarantee the balance between supply and demand, despite the situation. Sophie helps RTE to build the emergency plan and to navigate through it. Data from previous years, the beginning of the cold season, and data from prediction were used to build an efficient plan.
If you want to know more, check out her slides below.
Our speakers are always happy to answer your questions! If you have any, you can contact them directly.
As an extra bonus, the meetup speakers and participants got T-shirts with our logo, which were sponsored by vpTech back in September 2019, before the pandemics.
Accidentally, we have more T-shirts in two colours and in different sizes: come to our next meetup to get one for yourself 😉.
If you do not want to miss our T-shirts and our events, you can:
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