The Data & AI specialist track is all about the technology, skills, and practices that engineers, data scientists, and researchers need when building effective and reliable solutions that involve data and leverage different flavours of machine learning and automation. We’re excited to hear talks that cover a wide range of topics relating to data science, data engineering, ML engineering, and

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Thanks for coming to the Scientific Python track!

Welcome to the Education track!

Thanks for coming to the Education track!

Like regular talks, but shorter! Anything could happen!

The Data & AI specialist track is all about the technology, skills, and practices that engineers, data scientists, and researchers need when building effective and reliable solutions that involve data and leverage different flavours of machine learning and automation. We’re excited to hear talks that cover a wide range of topics relating to data science, data engineering, ML engineering, and

Python has become one of the cornerstone languages for developing scientific software, thanks to its flexibility, extensibility, ease of use and extensive ecosystem. Whether you’re doing machine learning, processing & visualising data, or running a statistical analysis, there’s a good chance there's a Python package that can help get you to a result quickly. This track is for anyone using

Follow my journey from drowning in the world of data structures to understanding through implementation. Skip Lists... What are they? Why are they? And how do they work? These are all questions I sought to answer after I discovered them in the wild. Come and find out why I think writing your data structures from scratch might be the best way to understand them.

Discover how Snowflake's AI Data Cloud revolutionizes Python-powered machine learning at scale. Learn how Snow Pandas brings familiar pandas operations to massive datasets for scalable data engineering, explore advanced feature engineering with Snowflake ML's distributed processing capabilities, and witness distributed ML training. Build millions of models in parallel across partitions with

Python is slow for certain tasks. That's not news. The usual response is to either accept the performance hit or rewrite everything in another language. There's a third option: use Python as the control centre and delegate specific tasks to languages that excel at them. This talk provides practical patterns for building polyglot applications. I'll show JavaScript handling real-time web

This presentation will introduce the audience to the fields of electricity market modelling and mathematical optimisation (MO).The talk will be comprised of three sections: The first section will provide some background and context for the audience. We will describe what an electricity market is, how it functions, and the energy transition which is changing how we build and operate the grid.

Have you ever wondered if life would be better with a robot scorpion by your side? Now’s your chance to find out! Meet Pinchy — a Raspberry Pi-powered, fully autonomous, and undeniably eye-catching robot companion. In this talk, you’ll learn how Pinchy maps its environment and navigates with ease using SLAM algorithms and computer vision. We’ll also dive into the efficient design inspired by

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives, including content repositories, business tools, and development environments. This talk explores practical implementation patterns for building robust MCP servers in Python, covering architecture decisions, error handling strategies, and real-world deployment considerations. You'll

Designing for inclusion isn’t about ticking boxes, avoiding lawsuits, or expanding markets—it’s about people. True inclusion starts with the individuals we meet and the stories we choose to share. My journey into digital accessibility has been deeply personal—shaped by my Dad, who was blind, navigating a world that too often overlooks people like him. As the designers and builders of

You, by which I mean all the Eukaryotes in the audience, are running on an operating system a couple of billion years old. Every cell in your body is full of primordial libraries, monkey patches, self-modifying code, viral hacks and even containers embedding a different operating system. This talk is all about the freakish parallels between cell biology and computer architecture, and will leave

With the arrival of large language models and the generative tools built on them we have seen a huge increase in pressure to use these tools in our work. This worries me, but it's hard to easily explain why. Am I being paranoid? Or just overly opposed to a change that's inevitable? Is it just... a skill issue? I invite you to listen to me dig through the history of the relationship

It's impossible to do software without the power of fonts and text rendering. They underpin the terminal we use to run our code, the browsers we use to run our web apps and the emails we get paid too much to write. But for many they are a black box of standards and code that seems to effortlessly click together, until they don't. This talk explores how this works from font file structures,

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Sometimes you inherit a clunky pipeline. Sometimes an LLM writes one for you. Either way, you’re stuck with something slow, memory-hungry, and hard to scale. This talk is about what happens next — how to turn a naive tabular data pipeline into something fast, efficient, and scalable. You’ll get a guided tour through a zoo of optimization techniques: reducing algorithmic complexity, minimizing

Showcase of student projects

In this session we will share our experience of using Apache Airflow to build production scientific modelling workflows. This will draw on our work at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on multiple projects which updated existing services to use Airflow – the eReefs water quantity and quality modelling and Seasonal Streamflow Forecasting services. Why invest effort to learn and then apply

The developer landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. What began with coding assistants has rapidly evolved into AI agents and autonomous systems that are reshaping how we build software. This evolution isn't slowing down—it's accelerating. In this session, we'll examine the current state of the developer ecosystem and how AI is fundamentally changing what it means to be a

Welcome to Saturday!