Edinburgh Data Science September Meetup

Explore probabilistic machine learning and the ARC Prize challenge at Edinburgh’s Data Science September Meetup, hosted at CodeBase on 17 September 2026. This community-led evening brings together data science and AI professionals, academics, students and curious newcomers for two technical talks, audience Q&A and relaxed networking over pizza and drinks. Taking place at CodeBase, 37a Castle Terrace, the meetup offers a friendly setting in Edinburgh to learn from experienced practitioners, exchange ideas and meet others working across machine learning and artificial intelligence. Talks and speakers Gábor Gulyás, Gradient Boosting for Probability Distributions Point-prediction models produce a single “best guess”, but an average can be misleading when outcomes follow very different paths, for example, when a bank customer may repay almost everything or leave nearly the entire balance exposed. Gábor will share a practical probabilistic machine learning journey through candidate scoring, Gaussian soft targets, bins and loss functions. He will then explain how reframing the problem around learning the conditional CDF with exact threshold labels provides a simpler approach. Gábor brings more than 20 years of experience in risk and forecasting, with a particular focus on banking. Nick Lade, Building an ARC to AGI: How Far Have We Actually Come? Nick will examine the ARC Prize and its definition of AGI as a system capable of matching human learning efficiency. ARC’s puzzles are often straightforward for people but remain difficult for AI systems that lead many other benchmarks. The session will explore the challenge, where frontier labs are, and are not, making progress, and the innovations emerging from a wider community working with more constrained resources. Nick’s background spans applied statistics, mathematics, data science and lead AI engineering roles, with a recurring focus on how humans and AI create value together. Evening format 5:00–6:10pm: Networking with pizza and drinks 6:10–7:30pm: Two talks followed by Q&A From 7:30pm: Continued networking at a local bar… Register for this event