Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City has graciously offered to host us at their stunning new downtown digs!
First up Piero Ferrante and Nick Tomasino will give an overview of what's new in the PyData ecosystem based on their recent trip out to PyData Seattle. With so many new and/or improved projects (e.g. Pandas, Blaze/Odo, xray, bcolz, Dask, PySpark, Jupyter, PyMC3, ...) and libraries popping up (which is a VERY good thing) it can be difficult to filter out the noise and synthesize the results. The presentation will be structured like a series of lightening talks.
Piero Ferrante is the Director of Data Science at C2FO, the world's market for working capital. His interests are in applied machine learning, econometrics, and text mining. Nick Tomasino (aka Nicky 6) is a Data Scientist at mySidewalk (by MindMixer) where he's helping connect us to friends and neighbors, local landmarks, and city leaders. His interests are in probabilistic programming, deep learning, and "old school Unix".
Dan Wancura will be discussing the proliferation of community gardens throughout Kansas City in the last several years.  Do these gardens really have an impact?  Dan will seek to answer this question with various quantitative methods while exploring other interesting trends in the data.
Dan has worked with electronic data interchange (EDI) for most of his professional career.  In the last 5 years, Dan has begun to focus on data analysis with respect to local sustainability efforts, local food in particular. With degrees in geography and computer science, he has used geographic concepts as a part of his general analysis.  
We'll also be discussing how to get involved in the KC Big Data Summit, some amazing speakers that have offered to speak at DSKC, and how to get more involved with BBBS!