News and thoughts – Page 3

Job offer: working on open source data processing in Python

We, Parietal team at INRIA, are recruiting software developers to work on open source machine learning and neuroimaging software in Python.

In general, we are looking for people who:

  • have a mathematical mindset,
  • are curious about data (ie like looking at data and understanding it)
  • have an affinity for problem-solving …

Euroscipy 2015: Call for paper

EuroScipy 2015, the annual conference on Python in science will take place in Cambridge, UK on 26-30 August 2015. The conference features two days of tutorials followed by two days of scientific talks & posters and an extra day dedicated to developer sprints. It is the major event in Europe in …

PRNI 2016: call for organization

The steering committee of PRNI (Pattern Recognition for NeuroImaging) is opening a call for bid to organize the conference in June 2016, in Europe

New website

I am moving my website to a new design, relying on Pelican and more modern CSS.

So far, I had been using rest2web to generate the static part of the website, and a local install of wordpress for the blog. I wasn’t doing good on keeping the wordpress install …

Improving your programming style in Python

Some references on software development techniques and patterns to help write better code.

Hiring an engineer to mine large functional-connectivity databases

Work with us to leverage leading-edge machine learning for neuroimaging

At Parietal, my research team, we work on improving the way brain images are analyzed, for medical diagnostic purposes, or to understand the brain better. We develop new machine-learning tools and investigate new methodologies for for quantifying brain function from …

Scikit-learn 2014 sprint: a report

A week ago, the 2014 edition of the scikit-learn sprint was held in Paris. This was the third time that we held an internation sprint and it was hugely productive, and great fun, as always.

Great people and great venues

We had a mix of core contributors and newcomers, which …

Scikit-learn 0.15 release: highlights

We have just released the 0.15 version of scikit-learn. Hurray!! Thanks to all involved.

A long development stretch

It’s been a while since the last release of scikit-learn. So a lot has happened. Exactly 2611 commits according my count. Quite clearly, we have more and more existing code …

Google summer of code projects for scikit-learn

I’d like to welcome the four students that were accepted for the GSoC this year:

  • Issam: Extending Neural networks
  • Hamzeh: Sparse Support for Ensemble Methods
  • Manoj: Making Linear models faster
  • Maheshakya: Locality Sensitive Hashing

Welcome to all of you. Your submissions were excellent, and you demonstrated a good will …

Hiring a programmer for a brain imaging machine-learning library

Work with us on putting machine learning in the hand of cognitive scientists

Parietal is a research team that creates advanced data analysis to mine functional brain images and solve medical and cognitive science problems. Our day to day work is to write machine-learning and statistics code to understand and …

Publishing scientific software matters

Christophe Pradal, Hans Peter Langtangen, and myself recently edited a version of the Journal of Computational Science on scientific software, in particular those written in Python. We wrote an editorial defending writing and publishing open source scientific software that I wish to summarize here. The full text preprint is openly …

Scikit-learn 0.14 release: features and benchmarks

I have tagged and released the scikit-learn 0.14 release yesterday evening, after more than 6 months of heavy development from the team. I would like to give a quick overview of the highlights of this release in terms of features but also in term of performance. Indeed, the scikit-learn …

RIP John Hunter: the loss of a great man

John Hunter, the author of matplotlib passed away yesterday after a short battle against cancer. John gave the keynote at the scipy 2012 conference a few weeks ago, and was diagnosed with cancer just on his return from the conference. It is a shock to me that that a friend …

A journal promoting high-quality research code: dream and reality

Open research computation (ORC) was an attempt to create a scientific publication promoting high-quality and open source scientific code. The project went public in falls 2010, but last month, facing the low volume of submission, the editorial board chose to reorient it as a special track of an existing journal …

Update on scikit-learn: recent developments for machine learning in Python

Yesterday, we released version 0.11 of the scikit-learn toolkit for machine learning in Python, and there was much rejoincing.

Major features gained in the last releases

In the last 6 months, there have been many things happening with the scikit-learn. While I do not whish to give an exhaustive …

3 Google summer of code for scikit-learn and more…

The scikit-learn got 3 students accepted for the Google summer of code.

  • Imanuel Bayer will work on making our sparse linear models, for regression and classification, faster. His proposal Optimizing sparse linear models using coordinate descent and strong rules.
  • David Marek will implement multi-layer perceptrons for the scikit. His proposal …

The problems of low statistical power and publication bias

Lately, I have been a mood of scientific scepticism: I have the feeling that the worldwide academic system is more and more failing to produce useful research. Christophe Lalanne’s twitter feed lead me to an interesting article in a non-mainstream journal: A farewell to Bonferroni: the problems of low …

Want features? Just code

Somebody just sent an email on a user’s mailing list for an open-source scientific package entitled “Feature foo: why is package bar not up to the task?”. To quote him:

Is there ANY plan for having such a module in package bar?? I think (personally) that this is a …

Book review: NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s guide

Packt publishing sent me a copy of NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s guide by Ivan Idris.

The book actually covers more than only numpy: it is a full introduction to numerical computing with Python. The table of contents is the following:

  • NumPy Quick Start
  • Beginning with NumPy Fundamentals
  • Get into …

Joblib beta release: fast compressed persistence + Python 3

Joblib 0.6: better I/O and Python 3 support

Happy new year, every one. I have just released Joblib 0.6.0 beta. The highlights of the 0.6 release are a reworked enhanced pickler, and Python 3 support.

Many thanks go to the contributors to the 0.5 …