GHCI 2017: A note of thanks

2017 turned out to be a wonderful year with so much to learn, retrieve and experience. By the Quarter end, I was able to have my first post presentation at Grace Hopper Celebration India!!

Poster presentation: Optimal financial planning through narrative visualization with advanced filtering
The poster emphasized the importance of wise visualizations and dashboard performance.
I explained about I made use of cross filter, the importance of DB performance, storytelling, and ensuring reader's freedom while navigating across the dashboards.
I, out of  sheer joy, also told some of the audience who were keen on knowing more about it, about Strategy and Analytics and KDE which is one of the reasons behind the poster.
The audience found the poster creative :)
The presentation started at 12:30 pm and ended at 2:30 pm. I got wonderful response and some interesting feedback and questions from students, working professionals from FactSet, Athena Health Group, Intel and many others ! :)



Special thanks to Indus Valley Partners for encouraging me to go ahead !!
Special thanks to Gurvinder sir, Gaurav Aggarwal, Ashish, Himanshu, Tushar sir, Clifton and Deepesh for the encouragement!!


Rebecca Parsons
I also got to attend Rebecca Parson's session, no wonder her key note was more than awesome. It was highly encouraging to see her viewpoints and how to tackle difficult situations while maintaining work life balance ! Thank you Rebecca, I wanted to meet you in person.

S.A.P
I was also invited by S.A.P as soon as the poster presentation was over for a exclusive networking with them. It was amazing to see the way that ensures a gender diversity not just at the initial dev roles but at the managerial roles as well. A bicycle, making use of machine learning and augmented reality based products at their lounge drew my attention. (Thank you for the awesome travel bag and other goodies :D ) 

Bloomberg
It was a dream to meet them, because I have always adored their dashboards. I asked them many questions about their UI and they answered everything patiently. Thank you !!

WEQ
I got to see some inspirational stories about entrepreneurship and the stories behind the emerging startups

Hands on labs
I attended the hands on lab session by Microsoft and got to know about the VR project they are working on. I also got to know by one of their developer how the suggestions on bing appears which was particularly similar to Decision Science's enterprise search. (Memories)

I attended a mentoring session as well in which we can ask questions and get a perfect solution to everything. I was amazed by the sessions, fellow poster presentations and other interesting stuff !!

Thank you for making 2017 an awesome one for me.

crossfilterplus - Wrapper over crossfilter : Data manipulation is config driven now !

I noticed the fact that crossfilter is useful for data manipulation, not just at client side  ( as used in winlose analyzer) but the crossfilter npm module is useful as well ( it is used in comparator ). People are interested to use it but most of the times they are not willing to put extra code for the same. Hence I came up with the idea of making crossfilter config driven and hence named it - crossfilterplus. It is available at https://www.npmjs.com/package/crossfilterplus :)

One can use the commonly used methods such as dimension, group as standalone as well ( as shown in the following example ) as per their requirement. It can be used through config as well as shown below: 

To use it, please do the following:

var crossfilterPlus = require('crossfilterplus')

var data = [

  {date: "2011-11-14T16:17:54Z", quantity: 2, total: 190, tip: 100, type: "tab"},

  {date: "2011-11-14T16:20:19Z", quantity: 2, total: 190, tip: 100, type: "tab"},

  {date: "2011-11-14T16:28:54Z", quantity: 1, total: 300, tip: 200, type: "visa"},

  {date: "2011-11-14T17:22:59Z", quantity: 2, total: 90, tip: 0, type: "tab"},

  {date: "2011-11-14T17:25:45Z", quantity: 2, total: 200, tip: 0, type: "cash"},

  {date: "2011-11-14T17:29:52Z", quantity: 1, total: 200, tip: 100, type: "visa"}

]

Example -

#1 Access standalone methods

crossfilterPlus.data(data) // data method helps to create a crossfilter instance on the input dataset

var manipulateData = crossfilterPlus

   .dimension(['total','tip']) 

   .group()

   .all()

There is no need to create crossfilter instance and use it everytime to perform operation. crossfilterPlus is able to handle it. 

#2 Pass config 

Config :-

var config = {

  data: data, //required

  dimension: ['total','tip'], //could be a string or array or function else it shows a warning - mandatory 

  aggregate: 'sum', // by default it is count, works for sum. Need to enable more computation here

  measure: 'tip' // needed if aggregation is not count 

}

I intend to enhance this config more to make it available for sorting and other computations as well. Currently it groups based on the dimension layer.

After preparing the config - crossfilterPlus.build(config) will perform grouping based on the dimension applied over the input with aggregation as per measure  and will give same output as  manipulateData in #1  :) 

For reference to the above approaches, please refer API reference - https://github.com/Crossfilterplus/crossfilterplus/wiki/API-reference 

It is available at github at - https://github.com/Crossfilterplus/crossfilterplus

The future plans for it are as follow: 

• Make it more config driven
• Make nested grouping in crossfilterplus
• Try to integrate it with d3plus (https://github.com/alexandersimoes/d3plus/issues/110)

It will be great to have your suggestion as well. Please feel free to raise issues at the github repo as well. Since yesterday, there are +16 downloads :) 

Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017

Recently I got the opportunity to be a part of HKOSCon 2017 to present my views and talks on how one get started to contribute to KDE and the impact of data visualizations in financial world.

The atmosphere was filled with enthusiasm and the volunteers were helping the guests and speakers a lot.

KDE !!

What I did?

I was selected as a speaker and presented a talk on KDE regarding the open source contribution made by +The KDE Community with respect to my journey as a Season of KDE student to Google Code In co-administrator. 

I discussed about the recent trends in our community outreach program (SoK) as well as how vast KDE is. 

I also discussed about the plasma development in KDE and how I ported the plasmoids to plasma2. 

I also discussed about the tasks created by KDE in +Google Code-in , thanks to the admin team and constructive mentors. I also discussed a bit about +KDE-Edu game pairs.

How it helps KDE?

My talk helped to spread information about the programs and projects KDE is involved with. New contributors were keen to get involved with KDE as well.

I also discussed about Season of KDE to spread information about the same.

My notes are available at: https://github.com/fallacy321/Talks

Data Visualization: Portfolio management through storytelling using narrative visualization through crossfilter and sc.js

What I did? 

I presented a talk on Data Visualization and its impact on Portfolio Management with hands on crossfilter to stimulate visualizations in dc.js

I discussed about the importance of visualizations and its performance, why we should be knowing more about portfolio management, the concept of storytelling and its impact on performance. 

I also discussed about crossfilter and dc.js and why it is going to be the next big thing !! 

Some of the interesting events/talks I noticed are: 

• Global FOSS Community Meetup: Open source enthusiasts came together to discuss about the on going events and projects that finds fascinating to work with. I got to know a bit about open source in kernel through Vaishali. Through Vigneshwar, I came to know about MozFest and I am looking forward to it. !! Weng gave an insight of KDE as well. I also got to learn about the importance of culture through a casual discussion over it
• Better than Free Giveaways - Case Studies of Open Source Business Models: Dr. Haggen So presented a great talk over various open source business models. I also got to know about Creative Common License during the talk
• npm discussion - I got to know about some handy npm commands such as npm run. I need to explore around it though

I met some interesting people in HKOSCon and a delightful dinner with a beautiful view made it more lively. 

I also got to know about Seekers Capital Group and other firms which found the talks interesting and something they wish to try as well. 

Overall it was a great experience. I wish I could keep on working on interesting stuff which would have a impact in future as well!!

Thank you Hong Kong Open Source Conference for inviting me. It was a great experience !! 

CSharpCorner Conference 2017

I recently attended CSharpCorner Conference and I was amazed to know about on going projects on machine learning, AI, angular 4.0 and bootstrap !

In this blog, I will be noting down the key points about the conference

I found the following projects and discussions quite interesting:

• Machine learning - Brief introduction : It discussed about getting supervised and unsupervised learning. Predicting output from input data set using excel and R.  Demonstrated classification in machine learning using excel and R. Correlated the output obtained using excel and R, ( outputs were similar ) 

• Building intelligent bots: Discussed about Bot framework. Found it interesting, found it a bit similar to enterprise search. Demonstrated chat bots ( Perhaps we can think of having chat bots in commentary ) 

• Building Native apps using ionic: Discussed about building native apps using ionic. Seems interesting to get started, well documented ( we can think of poc )

• Bootstrap 4.0: Discussed about the new features and classed in bootstrap 4.0 such as btn-default is replaced to btn-secondary (because in mobile, primary and secondary exists instead of default and secondary, replacing px by rem etc)                               

•  Building augmented reality app using Vuforia: Build AR app and demonstrated it live which was pretty interesting 

• Syncfusion:  Also, I went to syncfusion camp, where they discussed about their project and demonstrated it.  Syncfusion is similar to powerBI tool which is useful for making mockups. It is not open source, though is free for individual developers or small organisations. Though it is free for demo purpose. It is a chennai based startup. Also supports interactivity among dashboards, however interactivity among visualizations (as in dc.js ) is in progress (They have agreed for a free trial version :) , lets see !! )