Hello! I brought insight for St. Petersburg residents - where to find the local ML community.

Hello! I brought insight for St. Petersburg residents - where to find the local ML community. In 2014, I graduated from the Data Analysis School. If you don't know, DAS is a hard two-year program by Yandex for training data scientists and ML specialists. My studies there gave me a lot, so I recommend it. Recently, I learned that in St. Petersburg, there has been a DAS space for two years, available not only for students but also for anyone interested in DS/ML. Yesterday, we celebrated its second anniversary, to which I was invited as an alumnus. I couldn't attend in person, but I sent an invitation to a friend - it was interesting to see what ML specialists in St. Petersburg are currently engaged in. At the event, there was a program: an expert from Yandex's cloud services gave a lecture on deploying AI systems into production, and the head of DAS, Alexey Tolstikov, raised the question of the differences and advantages of competitive and classical training formats. But for me, the most important thing in such stories is networking. The organizers held several open discussions, and right from the entrance, they offered to participate in activities for introductions. In my opinion, this is a very cool opportunity for communication and idea exchange. This way, you can gather a team and launch a new project.