PR stuffs

I joined yesterday evening another Meetup hosted by Bayer in Berlin. A master class about PR in the digital age given by Andreas Winiarski from RCKT & Rocket Internet. 

Why attending this event you may ask? First of all I heard about of the mini burgers legend that are possibly served during the Meetup organized at this location... No burgers this time but mini flammkuchen, so that wasn't too bad. Secondly and more seriously I was curious to hear a PR person talking about his work and experience. I'm not one of them - I'm a data scientist with a liking for computer vision and color science - but in my work, at some point, I may have to communicate with the communicating people.

What I like about the talk was the way - it seems - this profession has changed putting the people more in control by taking control of the available tools: you are the first communicator. You don't need much of infrastructure to start spreading your voice as you are always two clicks away from starting a blog.

I also appreciate the position of the speaker - and I guess the one of the company he is representing - regarding where they want to go, what they want to achieve. The internet is not only reserved to the US or China. Germany and Europe have to be part the game. There is no local market, everything is global from the beginning and the model followed by Rocket Internet is completely going in that direction.

To be short that was a pretty interesting presentation. I can't say I learned many new things, but it's nice to see some of your thoughts formalized by others. It make you feel that you are not completely disconnected from the world.

About not being an expert as a data scientist and other tech stuffs

Last evening I did attend a joined Meetup from the Python User Berlin (PUB) and the Zalando Tech Event hosted by Zalando and offering talks on Natural Langage Processing (NLP). Both talks went well and gave two views on the topic: one on the state of the art of the tools for NLP using Python and a second more applied.

The discussions I add after while enjoying a club mate - la boisson des champions - were equally interesting. First of all I started discussing with a expert of NLP trying to explain why I joined this event and what was my link with NLP. In my very recent job experience at EyeEm I just touched the surface of NLP preparing data for Machine Learning (ML) using nltk together with WordNet, ImageNet. Actually I didn't do much of text analysis but batching word definition. In that experiment the text analysis will have come after this step and that's where semantic is jumping into the discussion. Because working with the word dictionary is one side of the problem: you have one word with its definition and often - at least with scientists or engineers - you are in the inverse configuration which is you having words when actually you want to extract a definition, an idea, an information... And I let you google automatic image tagging, deep learning.

After exchanging ideas and experiences about NLP I did continue seeping the offered mate with one Zalando employee. I was curious - as usual - to understand what it means to be a data scientist here. Because if the definition is very general - a data scientist works with data, we are not expert - it's interesting to see how many fields we - I'm one of those people - cover in our daily work. Using the same language - e.g. Python - we can go from signal processing, computer vision, image retrieval, NLP, how to deal with Databases - a year ago I wrote on the topic Databases and natural Langage graphs en stock - how to present your results to non expert by doing nice visualization and many more... So if we are not expert we need to be pretty fast I acquiring skills from various fields and/or use the appropriate tools.