Events
Our monthly events feature presentations and discussions from local experts.
News
Our monthly newsletter features links to interesting articles, tutorials, and tools related to data science, analytics, and big data.
About Us
Data Works MD consists of professionals, students, and enthusiasts living and working in the Maryland area that are interested in topics related to data science, data analytics, data products, software engineering, machine learning, and other data engineering topics.
Upcoming
Register for one of our upcoming events!
July 21, 2022
(Don't) Mind the Gap: Bridging the Worlds of People and IoT Devices
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to improve our lives through different services given the diversity of smart devices and their capabilities. But the large amounts of highly heterogeneous data captured by IoT devices typically require further processing to become useful information. The challenge is thus for IoT systems to determine which sensor data has to be captured/stored/processed/shared to, for instance, determine the occupancy of a specific office building or the spaces in which a potential COVID-19 exposure took place. This becomes even more challenging when IoT systems have to take into account privacy preferences of individuals. In this talk, I will introduce research efforts in the intersection of data management, knowledge representation & reasoning, and privacy to help IoT systems bridge the gap between the world of IoT devices and the world where people act.
Videos
Recent videos of our events can be found below. More are available at YouTube.
How to use Sentiment Analysis for Marketing
Sentiment analysis is an artificial intelligence technique that uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze text for polarity of opinion (positive to negative). Understanding how people are responding to specific ad campaigns through social media interaction or how well a product is being received through reviews can be a powerful tool to drive business decisions for any organization. During this discussion, I will introduce the process for establishing a corpus and creating a Sentiment Analysis model using Python's Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK) and Tensorflow. Join us in May as we return to in-person events with a workshop on using NLP for marketing. This will be an interactive event. Attendees are encouraged to bring their laptops to follow along with the speaker.
The "Smart" White Cane - Using Augmentation for Navigation
People with blindness or impaired vision often face major challenges when navigating, especially in new environments or when traveling alone. Stanford University’s Intelligent Systems Lab recently developed a “smart” white cane that uses technology from self-driving cars to augment the traditional white cane and help users navigate safely and confidently. This talk will highlight this augmented cane, survey similar inventions, and explore key challenges and opportunities in designing navigation aids for people with blindness or impaired vision.
The Power of Attribute-Based Access Control
The terms role-based access control and attribute-based access control are well known, but not necessarily well understood — or well defined, for that matter. If attribute-based access control includes user roles, then what is role-based access control? Where is the line drawn? Fundamentally, these data access control terms — role-based access control and attribute-based access control — are poorly named and confusing. That’s because they are less about the role or attribute, and more about how the policy is handled. Policies are central to access controls and how they’re applied is the defining factor between role-based and attribute-based access control. More importantly, what they allow data teams to do distinguishes highly efficient and secure data use from cumbersome, risky practices.
Demystifying Micro-Frontends
In 2019 a new frontend architecture raised from the community getting more traction in medium-large size companies. The community splits into people who believes micro-frontends could help delivering autonomous part of our applications accelerating and improving the way organisations work and who believes are not a silver bullet and they could be considered almost an anti-pattern. During this session, Luca will provide an explanation of what micro-frontends are and what are the key concepts behind this new frontend architecture
Introducing D3FEND, A Knowledge Graph of Cybersecurity Countermeasures
D3FEND is a knowledge base, but more specifically a knowledge graph, of cybersecurity countermeasure techniques. In the simplest sense, it is a catalog of defensive cybersecurity techniques and their relationships to offensive/adversary techniques. The primary goal of the initial D3FEND release is to help standardize the vocabulary used to describe defensive cybersecurity technology functionality.
Enabling Cross-Boundary Data Science with Privacy Enhancing Tech
As data protection becomes more important, it becomes more and more challenging to easily work with such data. How do you both secure data while making it accessible? With homomorphic encryption, users can do just that. Join us in October to hear from one of the leaders in data protection on how data scientists can work with encrypted data.
Newsletter
Interesting articles, tools, and tutorials. More are available at our newsletter archive.
Data Works MD June 2022 Issue
Data lineage, the image creating DALL-E, and a data scientist's guide to measuring product success, and more...
Data Works MD May 2022 Issue
Hidden costs of complexity, state of AI, MLOps, and more...
Data Works MD April 2022 Issue
Data-driven cultures, MLOps, model deployment, and more...
Partners
We are proudly supported by the following organizations.
Erias Ventures was founded to serve its customers with an entrepreneurship mindset. We value taking action, having the courage to commit, and persevering through challenges and failures.
Varen Technologies is a trusted industry leader delivering innovative solutions in cyber security, analytics, augmented intelligence, Agile Software Development and IT/maintenance for our partner clients including the federal government, Department of Defense, Homeland Security and other Cyber Defense organizations.
ClearEdge is a mission-driven technology thought leader grown out of the Intelligence Community that provides software engineering, big data, cloud, data analytics, and data science solutions and services. We are committed to exceeding our customer’s expectations by attracting and retaining top-tier engineers and experts.