Natural Language Processing Talk – Newspaper Article

Posted on By jrogel

With the lockdown and social distancing rules forcing all of us to adjust our calendars, events and even lesson plans and lectures, I was not surprised to hear of speaking opportunities that otherwise may not arise.

A great example is the reprise of a talk I gave about a year ago while visiting Mexico. It was a great opportunity to talk to Social Science students at the Political Science Faculty of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. The subject was open but had to cover the use of technology and I thought that talking about the use of natural language processing in terms of digital humanities would be a winner. And it was…

In March this year I was approached by the Faculty to re-run the talk but this time instead of doing it face to face we would use a teleconference room. Not only was I, the speaker, talking from the comfort of my own living room, but also all the attendees would be at home. Furthermore, some of the students may not have access to the live presentation (lack of broadband, equipment, etc) and recoding the session for later usage was the best option for them.

I didn’t hesitate in saying yes, and I enjoyed the interaction a lot. Today I learnt that the session was the focus of a small note in a local newspaper. The session was run in Spanish and the note in Portal, the local newspaper, is in Spanish too. I really liked that they picked a line I used in the session to convince the students that technology is not just for the natural sciences:

“Hay que hacer ciencias sociales con técnicas del Siglo XIX… El mundo es de los geeks.

“We should study social sciences applying techniques of the 21st Century. The world today belongs to us, the geeks.

The point is that although qualitative and quantitative techniques are widely used in social science, the use of new platforms and even programming languages such as python open up opportunities for social scientists too.

The talk is available in the blog the class uses to share their discussions: The Share Knowledge Network – Follow this link for the talk.

The newspaper article by Ximena Barragán can be found here.

Cover Draft for “Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python”

Posted on By jrogel

I have received the latest information about the status of my book “Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python”. This time reviewing the latest cover drafts for the book.

This is currently my favourite one.

Awaiting the proofreading comments, and I hope to update you about that soon.

Pandas 1.0 is out

Posted on By jrogel

If you are interested in #DataScience you surely have heard of #pandas and you would be pleased to hear that version 1.0 finally out. With better integration with bumpy and improvements with numba among others. Take a look!
— Read on www.anaconda.com/pandas-1-0-is-here/

Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python – Submitted!

Posted on By jrogel

There you go, the first checkpoint is completed: I have officially submitted the completed version of “Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python”.

The book has been some time in the making (and in the thinking…). It is a follow up from my previous book, imaginatively called “Data Science and Analytics with Python” . The book covers aspects that were necessarily left out in the previous volume; however, the readers in mind are still technical people interested in moving into the data science and analytics world. I have tried to keep the same tone as in the first book, peppering the pages with some bits and bobs of popular culture, science fiction and indeed Monty Python puns. 

Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python enables data scientists to continue developing their skills and apply them in business as well as academic settings. The subjects discussed in this book are complementary and a follow up from the topics discuss in Data Science and Analytics with Python. The aim is to cover important advanced areas in data science using tools developed in Python such as SciKit-learn, Pandas, Numpy, Beautiful Soup, NLTK, NetworkX and others. The development is also supported by the use of frameworks such as Keras, TensorFlow and Core ML, as well as Swift for the development of iOS and MacOS applications.

The book can be read independently form the previous volume and each of the chapters in this volume is sufficiently independent from the others proving flexibiity for the reader. Each of the topics adressed in the book tackles the data science workflow from a practical perspective, concentrating on the process and results obtained. The implementation and deployment of trained models are central to the book

Time series analysis, natural language processing, topic modelling, social network analysis, neural networds and deep learning are comprehensively covrered in the book. The book discusses the need to develop data products and tackles the subject of bringing models to their intended audiences. In this case literally to the users fingertips in the form of an iPhone app.

While the book is still in the oven, you may want to take a look at the first volume. You can get your copy here:

Furthermore you can see my Author profile here.

Natural Language Processing – Talk

Posted on By jrogel

Last October I had the great opportunity to come and give a talk at the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas, UAEM, México. The main audience were students of the qualitative analysis methods course, but there were people also from informatics and systems engineering.

It was an opportunity to showcase some of the advances that natural language processing offers to social scientists interested in analysing discourse, from politics through to social interactions.

The talk covered a introduction and brief history of the field. We went through the different stages of the analysis, from reading the data, obtaining tokens and labelling their part of speech (POS) and then looking at syntactic and semantic analysis.

We finished the session with a couple of demos. One looking at speeches of Clinton and Trump during their presidential campaigns; the other one was a simple analysis of a novel in Spanish.

Thanks for the invite.

Adding new conda environment kernel to Jupyter and nteract

Posted on By jrogel

I know there are a ton of posts out there covering this very topic. I am writing this post more for my out benefit, so that I have a reliable place to check the commands I need to add a new conda environment to my Jupyter and nteract IDEs.

First to create an environment that contains, say TensorFlow, Pillow, Keras and pandas we need to type the following in the command line: 

$ conda create -n tensorflow_env tensorflow pillow keras pandas jupyter ipykernel nb_conda

Now, to add this to the list of available environments in either Jupyter or nteract, we type the following:

$ conda activate tensor_env

$ python -m ipykernel install --name tensorflow_env


$ conda deactivate


Et voilà, you should now see the environment in the dropdown menu!

Data Science and Analytics with Python – Social Network Analysis

Posted on By jrogel

Using the time wisely during the Bank Holiday weekend. As my dad would say, “resting while making bricks”… Currently reviewing/editing/correcting Chapter 3 of “Advanced Data Science and Analytics with Python”. Yes, that is volume 2 of “Data Science and Analytics with Python“.

NSA_jrs.jpg

Python – Pendulum

Posted on By jrogel

Working with dates and times in programming can be a painful test at times. In Python, there are some excellent libraries that help with all the pain, and recently I became aware of Pendulum. It is effectively are replacement for the standard datetime class and it has a number of improvements. Check out the documentation for further information.

Installation of the packages is straightforward with pip:

$ pip install pendulum

For example, some simple manipulations involving time zones:

import pendulum

now = pendulum.now('Europe/Paris')

# Changing timezone
now.in_timezone('America/Toronto')

# Default support for common datetime formats
now.to_iso8601_string()

# Shifting
now.add(days=2)

Duration can be used as a replacement for the standard timedelta class:

dur = pendulum.duration(days=15)

# More properties
dur.weeks
dur.hours

# Handy methods
dur.in_hours()
360
dur.in_words(locale='en_us')
'2 weeks 1 day'

It also supports the definition of a period, i.e. a duration that is aware of the DateTime instances that created it. For example:

dt1 = pendulum.now()
dt2 = dt1.add(days=3)

# A period is the difference between 2 instances
period = dt2 - dt1

period.in_weekdays()
period.in_weekend_days()

# A period is iterable
for dt in period:
    print(dt)

Give it a go, and let me know what you think of it. 

IEEE Language Rankings 2018

Posted on By jrogel

Python retains its top spot in the fifth annual IEEE Spectrum top programming language rankings, and also gains a designation as an “embedded language”. Data science language R remains the only domain-specific slot in the top 10 (where it as listed as an “enterprise language”) and drops one place compared to its 2017 ranking to take the #7 spot.

Looking at other data-oriented languages, Matlab as at #11 (up 3 places), SQL is at #24 (down 1), Julia at #32 (down 1) and SAS at #40 (down 3). Click the screenshot below for an interactive version of the chart where you can also explore the top 50 rankings.

Language Rank

The IEEE Spectrum rankings are based on search, social media, and job listing trends, GitHub repositories, and mentions in journal articles. You can find details on the ranking methodology here, and discussion of the trends behind the 2018 rankings at the link below.

IEEE Spectrum: The 2018 Top Programming Languages