My Year of Crawling
Seraphina will be talking about the processes entailed in building robots for scraping data off the web, and the sorts of problems that may be encountered on the way. Among some of the topics to be covered, are regular expressions and how they are used for pattern matching, the sorts of 'steps' you will need to add to your crawler, to determine what you want it to do, and to conclude - ideas for how and where these skills could be applied and developed, and where one could go next. Seraphina will be going through several example problems and solutions throughout, covering both the build and debugging stages.
This talk is aimed at a broad audience - from the complete novice, to the more expert individual who wants to get another perspective on data scraping. Newbies will leave with a good idea of how to go about building a robot, and the sort of thinking required for tackling issues along the way, and the pros in the audience will have learned a new trick or two.
Seraphina has a BA Hons Degree in Fine Art Film and Video from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, a Masters in Animation from the Royal College of Art, and is in the process of studying towards a Degree in Mathematics with the Open University. She has been working at the Friday Media Group as a data harvester since April 2013, which has kindled an interest in learning more about the processes within Data Science.
Update
You can find Seraphina's slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/Seraphina1979/my-year-of-crawling
Here is the video of the talk.