Analytics Club – data analytics in Dublin on a Tuesday night

I found out quite by accident a week or two ago that there were occasional data analytics meet ups in Dublin city centre so I resolved to go along to the next one and found myself downstairs in a city center bar I’d never noticed before. The evening is run under the auspices of CeADAR and the DIT data analytics course with a few blowins like myself. It was quite an interesting event. There were three talks – one on PowerPivot which may or may not be interesting to you; one on datamining Dail questions since independence and specifically a comparison between local questions and national policy questions which raised a few comments, and then one final piece on the question of public policy and big data. It was followed up briefly by a panel discussion.

What surprised me about the event is that it was quite well attended for something which I figure can be quite esoteric, until I realised it was supported by a specific data analytics course in Dublin Institute of Technology. Input from CeADAR guaranteed some presence from UCD as well.

CeADAR is quite new in Ireland – it was launched on 15 March and it’s driven pretty much by UCD with some partnership from UCC and DIT. Looking at their education page is quite interesting…I would be hoping to see more datascience courses coming on stream. I know, for example that DCU has an analytics major coming with one of their Masters courses next year.

Back with the bash on Tuesday night, they are listed on Meetup and the next one will probably be in September. If you’re interested in data analytics or data science in Dublin, it may be worth a look.