Logistics

UPDATE: Please note change of rooms below. The introductory tutorials will be held at Moore 070 and the advanced at Beckman (the original plan was the reverse).

Two days of tutorials to the scientific Python tools comprise the first part of conference, taking place on Tuesday August 18 and Wednesday August 19. They will be held at:

• Introductory: 070 Moore Hall (subbasement, two floors down from street level).
• Advanced: Beckman Institute auditorium.

The Registration Desk will be open daily in the Beckman Institute Courtyard, 7:30 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. This is also where the coffee break service will be provided.

You can see the buildings marked on this map of the campus that lists all relevant buildings for the conference. Interactive and printable maps of the Caltech campus can also be found on Caltech's website, on those maps Beckman is building #74 and Moore is #93.

Description

There will be two tracks, one introducing new users to scientific computing in Python, and one covering in-depth specific tools and projects, aimed at experienced users.

The introductory track is aimed at someone who has basic programming experience and who has at least worked through the "official" online Python tutorial. But no major Python or numpy experience is expected, though familiarity with array languages like Matlab or IDL will obviously help. The introductory tutorial is a continuous, 2-day track that will combine short presentations with lots of hands-on exercises.

If you are looking for some resources to get going, you may find this "starter kit" page useful, which summarizes topics and links for the scientist looking to start using Python in computational research.

This introductory track will be presented by a group of experienced Python developers, who have made key contributions to a number of widely used scientific Python projects:

• Christopher Burns, U.C. Berkeley.
• David Cournapeau, Kyoto University.
• Michael Droettboom, Space Telescope Science Institute.
• Perry Greenfield, Space Telescope Science Institute.
• Eric Jones, Enthought Inc.
• Prabhu Ramachandran, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
• Stefan van der Walt, Stellenbosch University.
• Gael Varoquaux, Neurospin.

As for the advanced tutorials, after polling the community for preferred topics, the results are in.

Based on this community survey, our advanced track will consist of the following 8 2-hour tutorials:

• Advanced numpy: Stefan van der Walt and David Cournapeau.
• Advanced topics in matplotlib: John Hunter
• Symbolic computing with sympy: Ondrej Certik.
• Statistics with Scipy: Robert Kern.
• Cython: Dag Sverre Seljebotn.
• Using GPUs with PyCUDA: Nicolas Pinto.
• Designing scientific interfaces with Traits: Enthought.
• Mayavi/TVTK: Prabhu Ramachandran.

To see more detailed descriptions of both tracks, please see:

• Introductory track
• Advanced track