I'll 'show and tell' my covid Scotland app that I developed using the Shiny package in R. I'll aim to:
- Briefly introduce how Shiny works and how it aims to makes web development easy for novices like myself
- Explain the data sources, how the app manipulates the data and updates daily
- Walk through the app itself describing its basic structure and the motivation behind the design
In the second half of the meeting, a colleague will talk more broadly about the sorts of analysis/ visualisations we do.
BIO
I have been working as a Bioinformatician since October 2019 following a masters in Bioinformatics from Glasgow University and a BSc in Biochemistry and Pharmacology from Strathclyde University. In my current role I have been involved in a whole range of different projects, from profiling of disease vs. normal tissue using gene expression data, to utilising gene expression and whole genome sequencing data to try and identify novel biomarkers or gene signatures related to drug response in diseases such as breast cancer.
Jack is a bioinformatician at Fios Genomics ( www.fiosgenomics.com ).
Here's a brief interview with Jack about the app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L165H0EYR5s
N.b. The event link will be published and sent to attendees beforehand.
The Resilient Leader
Leaders today operate under levels of complexity and pace that demands advanced personal and interpersonal skills. Organisations rely on their leadership to create healthy working environments that nurture resilience within their teams. To do this, Leaders need to also build their resilience and be great role models to the people they lead. Leaders with high resilience can make a huge impact on Engagement; Productivity; Stress Reduction; Handling Additional Pressure and Improving the Wellbeing of Self and Others.
Topics for Exploration
In these times:
• Improving and sustaining the climate of remote Agile Teams – the business imperative
• Creating a motivated high performing team - the key skills for building team collaboration and cohesion whilst working virtually and why they are important:
- Creating psychological safety
- Building resilience
- Leadership behaviours that make the biggest difference
• How to build your resilience.
Speaker
Catherine Thomson of The Houston Exchange is an experienced practitioner in Organisation & Leadership Development with specialist knowledge on Psychological Safety, Emotional Intelligence and Building Resilience. She brings the latest thinking to her development programmes and creates a learning environment which allows leaders to have existing mindsets challenged whilst being supported to liberate their leadership potential.
If you would like to speak at any event or facilitate a workshop/activity, please get in touch with the organisers.
As part of the Agile20Reflect festival and in support of charity Venture Scotland, LAE sponsors, Calba, are running a virtual Building Trust session.
The festival is a month of free virtual events around the globe, celebrating 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was published.
SESSION DESCRIPTION
In any team, group or organisation aspiring to be agile, a vital ingredient to being successful is trust. It is a cornerstone to creating psychologically safe environments.
There is much said about needing trust, but where do you start with building trust?
In this interactive session you will learn a simple and powerful approach to start understanding and building trust within teams, organisations, and with others.
The session will be held via Zoom.us with interaction using breakout rooms, chat and miro.com. Where possible, participants are encouraged to have webcams turned on.
SPEAKER
Stephen McAinsh is an agile coach and trainer with Calba. He strongly believes in focusing on people, influenced from his past experience as a personal development leader with charities Venture Scotland and Raleigh International, including four overseas expeditions.
He started his career in the 80s with HP who were pioneering new manufacturing techniques, many of which we term as agile today. He has led transformation programmes across Europe, Japan, and the US.
Stephen founded Calba in 2010 to focus on agile coaching and training in Scotland, and started Lean Agile Edinburgh in 2013.
Venture Scotland (Registered Charity No. SC013901) runs outdoor-based personal development activities for young people who face complex and difficult problems. They build their confidence and skills to empower them to make positive choices.
If you would like to make a donation, please go to https://www.justgiving.com/venturescotland and mention "Building Trust" in the message. Thank you!
This meetup will take place online via Zoom (starting 6.30pm).
Click the link in the invite to enter the meeting.
If you're new to the group and/or would like to meet up for some chat beforehand I'll be around from 6.15pm onwards. Please feel free to drop in and say hello.
6.30pm - Intro & community announcements
6.45pm - Talk: Want to change behaviour? Think small! (Mike Jefferson)
7.15pm - Discussion: The future of UX - How will changes in the world shape our profession?
8pm - Edinburgh UX meetup in 2021
8.20pm - Closing chat
Join our new Slack group and become part of the online Edinburgh UX community!
https://join.slack.com/t/ux-edinburgh/shared_invite/zt-ll1qm8t1-mhrms4D7LOpDGXiZJfO1VA
Join our new Slack group and become part of the online Edinburgh UX community!
https://join.slack.com/t/ux-edinburgh/shared_invite/zt-e9m01nfk-Il55YpFGmM_BBt95DdXcPg
This meetup will take place online via Zoom (starting 6.30pm).
Click the link in the invite to enter the meeting.
Join our new Slack group and become part of the online Edinburgh UX community!
https://join.slack.com/t/ux-edinburgh/shared_invite/zt-e9m01nfk-Il55YpFGmM_BBt95DdXcPg
This meetup will take place online via Zoom (starting 6.30pm).
Click the link in the invite to enter the meeting.
In this talk, I want to share the process and workflow I go through as someone who is approaching data visualization coming from the technical/scientific angle, and what I've been learning (and still do) about design and communication/journalism.
Data visualization is very much an intersection between the gathering of reliable and correct factual information (with all the machinery of data splunking and analysis + statistics) and its visual representation, which has to be not only appealing to the eye but also clean and to the point. I find that rather than using tools and libraries (which I still love and use anyway), drawing visuals by hand gives me the most freedom in crafting visual info the way I conceive it in my brain. Plus I enjoy drawing, even if my end results are not pretty nor professional - it's the process that matters to me.
I will do a little walkthrough of the messy line I follow when drawing a viz:
- getting excited about a topic;
- framing the question to gather data for;
- gathering said data (when I manage, I will talk about failures too);
polishing it;
- conceiving the representation and trying to execute it (the most delicate step).
I learn a lot along the way and I hope to teach others something too - from little facts about our world to bigger questions that need deeper investigations. See you there!
BIO
I work in data science, so I come to dataviz from the technical side - I have several years of experience in the field and a scientific formation (PhD in Physics), and a long-standing sweet spot for data. Because I've always loved measuring things and phenomena to extract quantitative info but also communicating results and sharing knowledge to any audience, I've started datavizzing various finds, teaching myself best practices in design and even data journalism. I've got a little project called "doodledatcard" (on Behance too) which aims at just that, where I hand-draw visualisations - the goal is purely educational, for both myself and for anyone who may find it interesting.
Martina is Data Science Lead at Edinburgh fashion tech company Mallzee (https://mallzee.com).
N.b. The event link will be published and sent to attendees beforehand.
Join our new Slack group and become part of the online Edinburgh UX community!
https://join.slack.com/t/ux-edinburgh/shared_invite/zt-ll1qm8t1-mhrms4D7LOpDGXiZJfO1VA
This meetup will take place online via Zoom (starting 6.30pm).
Click the link in the invite to enter the meeting.
In our first event as the Digital Rights Society at Edinburgh University, we'll be joined by Hannah Smethurst, researcher in privacy and educational tech at Newcastle Law School, to discuss the role of surveillance technology in higher education.
Due to the transition to online teaching in recent years, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, learning analytics and e-proctoring tools have grown in popularity in universities. However, these tools are often problematic: they discriminate (inadvertently or otherwise) by skin tone, disability and socio-economic status. Whether they are effective at all is heavily in dispute.
The University of Edinburgh makes use of these tools as well. As the Digital Rights Society, we investigated one specific feature, the Microsoft Office Productivity Score, and what its use means for the university's students.
Join us online on February 4th at 5pm GMT. Feel free to get in touch with questions for Hannah, either through our Meetup account or by contacting digitalrightssociety@fastmail.com. The link to the event will be posted here closer to the time.
Drawing data, from messy ideas to concept and design
Description changed:
Dr Martina Pugliese, Data Science Lead at Edinburgh fashion tech company Mallzee (https://mallzee.com) crunches numbers on computers all day.
But she also has a hobby... drawing visualisations by hand. Come and hear how she puts away the screen and strives to communicate data stories using only the tools of brain and hand.
Over the past 3 years Andy Kirk has been working on a vast, unnecessary data adventure to visualise every episode of the hit 90s TV show, Seinfeld. In September, he finished this project which, unexpectedly, turned in to a 240 page book.
In this talk Andy will go through his design process to share the detailed story behind this work. From the contextual circumstances, through the analytical stages of collecting and handling the data, as well as formulating his story, and on to the myriad design choices he made about matters like chart selections, colours and layout. You will learn about the rationale behind every decision and every pixel that ended up in the book.
Andy will also share insights into his mistakes, the inefficiencies, and the problems he struggled to overcome. Two attendees will also have the chance to win a copy of this limited edition printed work, tune in to find out how!
BIO
Andy Kirk is a Yorkshire-based data visualisation expert: design consultant, trainer, lecturer, author, speaker, researcher, host of the 'Explore Explain’ podcast and video series, and editor of visualisingdata.com
Since founding Visualising Data Ltd. in 2010, Andy has conducted over 300 training courses in 27 countries to +6500 delegates, with clients including Spotify, Google, EU Council, and Pfizer.
Andy has delivered post-graduate teaching with MICA (USA) and Imperial College, and is now an adjunct lecturer teaching data visualisation on a Masters programme at UCL. He has authored three books, with the most recent published by Sage in August 2019 and titled ‘Visualising Data: A Handbook for Data Driven Design (2nd edition)’.
He provides data visualisation consultancy services to organisations, helping them do more with their data, and has an ongoing engagement working with the Arsenal F.C. Performance Team.
Andy Kirk (www.visualisingdata.com/about/)
Author, 'Data Visualisation: A Handbook for Data Driven Design' and curator of one of the best collections of visualisation resources out there.
In the second meetup of January 2021, we're joined by Mary Llewellyn. Mary is a PhD student in Statistics at the University of Edinburgh and the co-founder and co-lead of the Piscopia Initiative.
Tackling the participation crisis of women and non-binary students in the mathematical sciences
The Piscopia Initiative (http://www.piscopia.co.uk) was founded in 2019 to tackle the participation crisis in mathematics postgraduate research programmes. In this talk, we will share the experiences of women and non-binary students in mathematics, as well as our own, and our plans for the future to change the landscape of mathematics.
Password for the Zoom session will be sent out on the day of the event. Find out local time of your event at https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=RLadies+Edinburgh+-+28+Jan+2021+Meetup&iso=20210128T1730&ah=1.
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R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community.
A question we often get is "Are men welcome to attend this event?"
As a diversity initiative, the mission of R-Ladies is to achieve proportionate representation by encouraging, inspiring, and empowering people of genders currently underrepresented in the R community. R-Ladies’ primary focus, therefore, is on supporting minority gender R enthusiasts to achieve their programming potential, by building a collaborative global network of R leaders, mentors, learners, and developers to facilitate individual and collective progress worldwide.
**As such, we strongly encourage cis-men who attend this event to come as guests of R-Ladies who are minority genders (including but not limited to cis/trans women, trans men, non-binary, genderqueer, agender).**
All attendees are strongly encouraged to review the R-Ladies Code of Conduct (https://rladies.org/code-of-conduct) and must abide by it.
Digital for Good - The Evolving Threat Landscape 2021
Description changed:
This month we are delighted to be part of Cyber Scotland week and have a very interesting speaker! Join us for our first meetup of 2021 on February 25th 6 pm on Zoom.
Here's what we have in store:
* Garry Scobie, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer ( CISO ) from University of Edinburgh Information Security Division- The Evolving Threat Landscape 2021 - Garry's presentation discusses the threat landscape for 2021, providing an overview of attack trends and what we may expect to see over the coming year. The importance of being aware threats can originate from a wide range of external and internal sources is highlighted, noting that threats are not always initiated by an anonymous hacker.
* Project updates! You'll hear how our projects with Drake Music and YoungScot are doing. There will be opportunities to volunteer and take part!
* Opportunity for charities to request help and seek advice with most pressing digital challenges
Join us on Thursday 18th February for the first EdLambda event of 2021!!
We'll be hosting the event virtually - so whilst unfortunately we can't supply much pizza or networking - we're hoping to give you fun evening nonetheless and plenty of opportunities to put your questions to our speakers!
To kick the year off, we'll be welcoming our special guest Philip Wadler to give a talk on "(Programming Languages) in Agda = Programming (Languages in Agda)"
This session will be an introduction to Philip's textbook here: Programming Language Foundations in Agda (plfa.inf.ed.ac.uk)
"To prove properties of programming languages in Agda, all we need do is program a description of those languages Agda. Finding an abstruse mathematical proof becomes as simple and as fun as hacking a program."
The event will start at 6:00pm with a quick intro from the EdLambda's hosts, before getting stuck into Philip's talk!
Thanks all! Please feel free to spread the word about this meetup on LinkedIn and Twitter!
This month's Lean Agile Edinburgh is taking place during the Agile20Reflect festival - a month of virtual events around the globe, celebrating 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was published.
We are joined this month by Sofia Antonopoulou, the Product Owner for PICAMS at Historic Environment Scotland (HES).
While the 300+ national monuments across Scotland are closed again due to current restrictions, Sofia will tell the story of how HES used agile to support the huge effort to reopen all sites last year.
PICAMS (Properties in Care Asset Management System) is a bespoke application developed in-house to help HES manage its amazing estate of over 300 historic monuments across Scotland. The PICAMS team uses agile and user-centred approaches to solve problems and develop new digital capabilities for the organisation. From April until August all HES properties had to close in response to the COVID pandemic. Reopening them was a monumental effort under tight timescales, which PICAMS was asked to support. The talk will focus on how the PICAMS team reacted to meet the challenge.
This month we have a security talk from Panda about Subdomain Takeovers.
If you have a subdomain pointing to an external hosting provider, like the Pages features on Github or Gitlab - get something in there ASAP - and Panda will tell us why!
This month, Keith will be talking to us about GlusterFS - a scale-out network-attached storage system: with a controller and attachable disks, infinite storage growth - well, nearly....!
This month's Lean Agile Edinburgh is taking place during the Agile20Reflect festival - a month of virtual events around the globe, celebrating 20 years since the Agile Manifesto was published.
We are joined this month by Sofia Antonopoulou, the Product Owner for PICAMS at Historic Environment Scotland (HES).
She will tell the story of how HES used agile to support the huge effort of re-opening 300+ national monuments across Scotland during COVID - and here we go again with the second lockdown…!
PICAMS (Properties in Care Asset Management System) is a bespoke application developed in-house to help HES manage its amazing estate of over 300 historic monuments across Scotland. The PICAMS team uses agile and user-centred approaches to solve problems and develop new digital capabilities for the organisation. From April until August all HES properties had to close in response to the COVID pandemic. Reopening them was a monumental effort under tight timescales, which PICAMS was asked to support. The talk will focus on how the PICAMS team reacted to meet the challenge.
In the second meetup of January 2021, we're joined by Mary Llewellyn. Mary is a PhD student in Statistics at the University of Edinburgh and the co-founder and co-lead of the Piscopia Initiative.
Tackling the participation crisis of women and non-binary students in the mathematical sciences
The Piscopia Initiative (http://www.piscopia.co.uk) was founded in 2019 to tackle the participation crisis in mathematics postgraduate research programmes. In this talk, we will share the experiences of women and non-binary students in mathematics, as well as our own, and our plans for the future to change the landscape of mathematics.
Password for the Zoom session will be sent out on the day of the event.
---
R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community.
A question we often get is "Are men welcome to attend this event?"
As a diversity initiative, the mission of R-Ladies is to achieve proportionate representation by encouraging, inspiring, and empowering people of genders currently underrepresented in the R community. R-Ladies’ primary focus, therefore, is on supporting minority gender R enthusiasts to achieve their programming potential, by building a collaborative global network of R leaders, mentors, learners, and developers to facilitate individual and collective progress worldwide.
**As such, we strongly encourage cis-men who attend this event to come as guests of R-Ladies who are minority genders (including but not limited to cis/trans women, trans men, non-binary, genderqueer, agender).**
All attendees are strongly encouraged to review the R-Ladies Code of Conduct (https://rladies.org/code-of-conduct) and must abide by it.
