Ian Stokes-Rees
Ian is a Computational Scientist and Software Engineer. His current role is "Partner in AI Engineering" with BCG, a global management consulting firm. He works with BCG's clients around the world to identify opportunities to combine data, technology, and analytics to create step change capabilities in their organization. What does that translate to? On a day-to-day basis it means leading crack teams of BCG engineers and data scientists in the development of AI-driven and (typically) Python-based bespoke solutions which leverage the best tools, technology, and techniques available.
Prior to BCG, Ian was a Product Manager at Anaconda, and has been in the Python community for over 20 years. Ian has a PhD from Oxford where he worked on the CERN LHCb experiment and developed the Python-based distributed computing middleware that managed 10 million queued physics jobs to schedule across a quarter million servers in a globally federated compute environment. He also spent several years at Harvard Medical School collaborating with bio physicists on novel techniques for protein structure discovery.
Ian is a member of the Python Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. In his free time he enjoys sailing, cycling, xc skiing, and motorbiking. On rainy days he'll pull out a board game to play with his wife & kids: Ark Nova, Ticket To Ride, and Takenoko are current favorites.
Session
In this 90 minute tutorial we'll get anyone with some basic Python and Command Line skills up and running with their own 100% laptop based set of LLMs, and explain some successful patterns for leveraging LLMs in a data analysis environment. We'll also highlight pit-falls waiting to catch you out, and encourage you that your pre-GenAI analytics skills are still relevant today and likely will be for the foreseeable future by demonstrating the limits of LLMs for data analysis tasks.