[Chennaipy] Minutes of May meetup

[Vivek Kailasnath]

Meetup started
Brief intro on the meetup by Vijay.
The purpose of the meetup is to network with other python enthusiasts and
to get inspired by the various talks. The talks also provide some exposure
to the different facets of development and the various problems that are
being tackled. A meetup is not a workshop.


TALK#1
How python is making astrophysical research easier
- by Manjari Bagchi, Professor at IMSc

Used python for her research!!! Wants to generate interest in astrophysics.
Studies cold dead stars that emit radio waves thanks to their magnetic
fields
They are also known neutron stars - about 10 times heavier than the sun -
very dense and regular gravitational physics cannot be used to explain
their gravitational behavior? (not clear how they  are different from black
holes)
Require huge dishes to capture data. Uses python for data analysis

First encounter in 2010 - to analyze pulsar data
Was using unix command line utilities to do this - basically shell
scripting. used the sigproc package developed by her mentor.
Popular library - astropy
There were some interesting asto terms that we were exposed to - right
ascension, galactic center, declination etc

Showed a few examples -
(#1) A file contained latitudes and longitudes of areas of interest which
exhibited strong radio bursts.
Python3 script to read this data and plot the positions on the globe - 3d
earth image projects on to a 2d oval shaped earth on the screen.
Used galpy for plotting(matplotlib?)

(#2) Downloaded some data on a nebula captured by the Hubble telescope.
Python script was used to plot this data.

(#3) Astro plan  - have the coordinate of most of the stars. Based on that
and the longitude, latitude and time in a particular location this module
will tell us if if that star is observable or not, rise time, set time and
a trajectory

(#4) galpy - a module for galactic dynamics


Call for contribution!!!
Project SKA - Square Kilometer Array. Huge sets of telescopes etc in
Australia and South Africa are used to capture data. Entire world is
involved in this project. A lot of programming is required for this. Those
interested can contact her

Link to the National Center for Radio Astrophysics (also contains links to
the SKA Indian team???)
http://www.ncra.tifr.res.in/ncra/main





TALK#2
Introduction to NLP & Spacy
- by Vishal  /  Student @SSN

Natural Language Processing
- parsing and mining information from natural language(as it is spoken or
written)

2 libraries in python - NLTK and Spacy
NLTK - created in Stanford purely for educational purposes. Its only for
English.

spaCy
Supports more than 28 languages
Much faster than NLTK.
Developed for the industry
Uses a lot of memory(RAM)

Terms
Corpus - large data set for training and experimenting.
NLTK has a lot of built in corpora

Basic Pre-processing
1) Convert everything to lower case.
2) regex - to extract specific data out (remove dates from a text)
3) Provision to handle special characters and encoding
4) Tokenization break it down to chunks that can be processed
5) Stopword elimination

Language Based Pre-processing
POS - parts of speech - tagging each work as a noun/verb/ajective etc
Stemming and lemmantization - get to the original word
stemming -car cars, car's invariably mean car
lematizer - more useful, allows you to get words that do not have any
common alphabets,but actually mean the same

Dived into code
An example of NLTK and spaCy were shown.
link to the code:




TALK#3
Sultan and Errbot(last months lightning talk expanded upon)
- by Samuel Vijaykumar(Freshworks)
Interacting with server via chat
e.g Ask chatty? - what is the status of a particular build, current load on
the server
ChatOps - currently used for managing infastructure.
- Devops through chatting -but not limited to it, usage limited by your
imagination.
Before developing, requirements were
# Conversational - not yet reached NLP
# Operational - manage operations based on user rights and security
# Extensible -
# Pythonic -
Demo -
create a slack channel, a plugin will allow you to execute your commands
errbot to create a bot.
sultan python library to ssh to servers and execute commands/ also create
agents that act on your behalf?
bot configuration
1) BACK END - POINTS TO  SLACK
2) BOT_IDENTITY -  POINTS TO THE SLACK CHANNEL?



Lightning Talk by #Prasanth   for microservices - lambda on aws  and an
alternative project called pywren to help with scaling.
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