The third Data Science Ireland Meetup drew our largest crowd to date with a full house at Huckletree D2 on what was another great evening of fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

We kicked things off on Wednesday evening with Sree Nagabhusnana from TechIreland, who told us about their progress on their data collection of Irish startups and how it is their mission to empower people and companies around the country to connect with Irish innovation.

TechIreland tracks the data of over 1800 companies using their search database of any company building an innovative product in Ireland. This is then used to attract more talent, more funding and more attention to Ireland as a great location to start and scale an innovation company.

TechIreland have presented their latest findings in their new book “Innovation Nation” and Sree took us through a glimpse of what you can expect by showing us the top sectors funded in 2017. The Healthcare industry was way out in front on 31 per cent with Fintech and Industrial Technologies rounding off the top three. There is plenty more of fantastic findings in the book and if you get a chance to get your hands on it, it is definitely worth the read.

Maciek Wasiak then took us through the predictive analytics Xpanse AI platform, which predicts customer behaviour by automatically integrating source data and analysing thousands of behavioural patterns which can save months of Data Scientist’s time. Maciek may not be a fan of the term “data science” but he said it is all about working with data and taking a heuristic approach. This means that there can be more than one solution to the problem and that we may not be able to say which one is better than the other.

The starting point of every Predictive Modelling project is training the target information, which then allows you to build a Predictive Model. However, you need to add additional input columns such as features, variables, factors etc. and the problem with this is that each table requires separate development which can take months of your time. As Maciek joked “so much for the sexiest job of the 21st century.”

Maciek saw that 70-75% of data scientists teams were spent on data preparation and so he created Xpanse AI to automate this process and the machine learning stages of predictive analytics. This would result in creating an inexpensive and ultra-fast delivery platform of all the models that companies need. Xpanse AI’s CTO Ger Harte also gave guests a demo of the Xpanse AI platform to really help them understand how all of this comes together.

The Xpanse AI team created the possibility of Predictive model capability from multiple non-aggregated, raw transactional data tables in any technical environment, all of which can be done within one to two hours. Incredible! There are many benefits that Xpanse AI can bring to you whether as a partner or a customer, including the chance dramatically increase your predictive model deployment, reduce project delivery timeframes and costs, as well as increasing your ROI.

There was definitely a lot of great insights to learn from at the MeetUp and we hope many of guests got a lot from the fantastic speakers and learned something can push their data science and AI journey to the next level. A big thank you goes out to all the speakers, the guys at Huckletree for lending us their great venue once again and of course to all our guests because without you, there would be no Data Science Ireland MeetUp.

We also shared details about our upcoming podcast, which will explore companies using AI, Machine Learning and Data Science to gain insight into the applications and implications of AI in Ireland. We got some good recommendations from the audience on the name of the podcast which will go live later in the month with a host of exciting guests already lined-up that we cannot wait to share with you.

We hope to see all of you back at Huckletree next month on Wednesday 6 June for the next MeetUp, where we will hear plenty of more exciting AI and Data Science insights from Creme Global’s Giulia Vilone, Sinead Flahive from Kitman Labs and Derilinx founder Deirdre Lee