Submission deadline May 8th
The deadline for the call for presentation for the EuroScipy conference is on May 8th. There is only a week and a half left.
EuroScipy will be held in Paris, August 25-28. It is the European meeting for users of Python in scientific and numerical-intensive applications. It strives to bring together both users and developers of scientific and numerical tools, as well as academic research and state of the art industry. The conference will host 2 days of tutorials and 2 days of technical presentations.
Lately, numerical computing in Python has started reaching a much wider audience than the traditional academic-oriented audience. This is partly because Python is making its way in major engineering companies, but also because more and more industries are processing large amounts of data, and find precious data analytics tools in the Scipy community. In this spirit, this year there will be a tutorial on machine learning with Python.
Poster session
Last year, the organizing committee had to refuse a large fraction of the proposals, because there were not enough slots available. We had considered organizing a poster sessions, but the logistics were to challenging for our little resources. Indeed, EuroSciPy still tries to be organized as a hackers and coders conference, rather than an industry-level one. For instance, we keep the prices to a minimum, in order to make it easy for young people traveling on their own budget to join us. Getting 200 attendees as we did last year, did strain our small organization committee.
This year, we had a unexpected backing of the physics department of the ENS. They were extremely enthusiastic about Python, that they now use for teaching and research. This made me really happy, as this is where I studied. They proposed help, and in particular help with the local organization.
Thus I am able to announce that thanks to the physics department of the ENS, we will be able to host a poster session!
An exciting program shaping up
The program is starting to shape up, and it is looking really good, in my eyes.
Keynotes
We will be having two keynote speakers, one directly from the SciPy community, Fernando Perez, and one probably less known to this community, Marian Petre.
- Marian Petre: Marian is the director of the Center for Research in Computing, at the Open University. She is interested in empirical studies of software development. I am very excited to hear a bit more about the often-forgotten human factor that goes behind every coding job, big or small. In my experience scientific computing and computational sciences pay a hefty price because they don’t acknowledge well-enough the gap between good ideas and tractable code.
- Fernando Perez: Fernando is a research scientist in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Before that, he was successively a physicist and a mathematician. He has been an early advocate of the scientific Python ecosystem, in addition to being the creator of IPython. His vision has always been oriented toward finding an computing environment that makes scientific creativity easier.
Tutorials
The tutorial program is now final, and can be seen on the schedule. Like last year, we will have two tracks:
- An introductory track, designed as a two-day course addressing the different aspects of the Python language and the scientific computing module to bring up beginners to full speed. At the end of the two days, attendee should be able to solve simple computational problems using Python alone.
- An advanced track, in which experts of various aspects of scientific and numerical computing in Python share their knowledge in 2-hours long tutorials.
Python in NeuroScience satellite
The two days following the conference, their will be a satellite meeting on the use Python in neuroscience. It will be a small and more focused event, in which neuroscientist will be able to exchange technical aspects of computation and data management in Python. Hopefully it will foster interest discussions and collaborations. if you are interested, you can submit a talk proposal for this satellite meeting here.
Come and join us at EuroScipy in Paris, Augst 25-28. Paris is a great city. The SciPy community is a friendly one.