Blogs

The slides of talks and tutorials from scipy 2010. Can be found here:
http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/download_slides/

Video of the scipy conference talks and tutorials can be found here.
http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/download_videos/

The scipy.in 2010 Press Release can be found in the following URL.
http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/publicity/

The conference schedule is still being updated and can be found at:
http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/talks-cfp/conference/
The scipy.in 2010 posters can be found in the following URL.
http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/publicity/

==========================================
SciPy 2010 Call for Papers & Participation
==========================================
The second SciPy India Conference (scipy.in) will be held from December 13th to 18th, 2010 at IIIT-Hyderabad (http://www.iiit.ac.in/).
Scipy.in is a conference providing opportunities to spread the use of the Python programming language in the Scientific Computing community in India. It provides a unique opportunity to interact with the "Who's who" of the Python for Scientific Computing fraternity and learn, understand, participate and contribute what is happening in the realms of Scientific Computing using Python. Attendees of the conference and participants of the sprints planned will be able to access and review the tools available, apart from learning domain-specific applications and how the tools apply to a plethora of application problems.
One of the goals of the conference is to combine education, engineering and science with computing through the medium of Python and thereby extrapolate on how powerful Scientific Computing is in various fields and among different communities.
At this conference, novel applications and breakthroughs made in the pursuit of science using Python are presented. Attended by leading figures from both academia and industry, it is an excellent opportunity to experience the cutting edge of scientific software development.
The conference is followed by three days of tutorials and code sprints, during which community experts provide training on several scientific Python packages.
We invite you to take part by submitting a talk abstract or register as a participant on the conference website at: http://scipy.in
Talk/Paper Submission
=====================
We solicit talks and accompanying papers (either formal academic or magazine-style articles) that discuss topics regarding scientific computing using Python, including applications, teaching, development and research. Papers are included in the peer-reviewed conference proceedings, published online.
Please note that submissions primarily aimed at the promotion of a commercial product or service will not be considered.
Important Dates
===============
Wednesday, Nov. 10: Abstracts Due
Monday, Nov. 15: Schedule announced
Sunday, Dec. 05: Proceedings paper submission due
Monday-Tuesday, Dec. 13-14: Conference
Wednesday-Friday, Dec. 15-17: Tutorials/Sprints
Saturday, Dec. 18: Sprints
The invited speakers
==================
* Fernando Perez -- PhD from University of Colorado. Currently at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Original author and leader of the IPython project for interactive computing (http://ipython.scipy.org), and member of the Python Software Foundation.
* John Hunter -- Ph.D. from University of Chicago. Currently at Tradelink, Inc. Chicago. Original author and lead developer of the scientific visualization package matplotlib.
* Perry Greenfield -- PhD, MIT. Currently at Space Telescope Science Institute, Maryland, USA. Has pioneered the use of Python in astronomy. He and his group have developed PyRAF, numarray (the precursor to current numpy capabilities), PyFITS and involved with the development of matplotlib.
* Prabhu Ramachandran -- PhD, IIT Madras. Currently a faculty member at IIT Bombay. He is the co-founder of the Indian Linux User Group - Chennai (ILUGC) and is the creator and lead developer of the (FOSS-India-award-winning) Mayavi and TVTK Python packages (http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi). Currently heads the FOSSEE (http://fossee.in) project.
* Stéfan van der Walt -- PhD, Stellenbosch University, SA. Currently a researcher and lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Stellenbosch University. One of the developers of the NumPy and SciPy packages.
* Jarrod Millman -- Member of the SciPy steering committee and an active contributor to both the NumPy and SciPy projects. He is the acting managing director and the director of computing for UC Berkeley's Neuroscience Institute, where he helped found the Neuroimaging in Python (NiPy) project.
* Satrajit Ghosh -- PhD Boston University. Currently a faculty member of the Speech and Hearing Biosciences and Technology program, Harvard-MIT. He is managing the development of the NiPy project (http://nipy.org/nipype/).
* Asokan Pichai -- Head - Software Engineering at TalentSprint. Consultant/Project manager for the Python group of the FOSSEE project. He has immense experience in the field of training and instructional design.
Organizers
==========
* Jarrod Millman, Neuroscience Institute, UC Berkeley, USA (Conference Co-Chair)
* Prabhu Ramachandran, Department of Aerospace Engineering, IIT Bombay, India (Conference Co-Chair)
* FOSSEE Team
* EnhanceEdu Team
About Python
============
Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented, open source, extensible programming language. It combines clarity and readability, making it an extremely powerful language that can be used for various applications and problems.
Python is simple and easy to learn and apply. It offers an interactive environment in which to explore procedural, functional and object oriented approaches to problem solving. Its high level data structures, extensive documentation and clear syntax make it an ideal first language, while the large number of existing libraries make it suitable to tackle almost any programming tasks. Its simplicity makes it easy to adapt to multiple educational domains.
Python has several libraries that enable numeric and symbolic computing. It also interfaces well with native codes in C,C++ and FORTRAN and has excellent libraries for plotting/visualization. Python also provides libraries for general purpose computing including generating user interfaces and web development. These, coupled with it's interactive interpreter, make Python an excellent language for Scientific Computing.
All these features when combined with their wide-ranging applications make Python a perfect fit for use in Education, Industry and Scientific Computing.
Registration Fees
===============
Registration, accommodation and food are offered at highly subsidized rates for teachers and students, while registration and food will be offered to all conference participants at subsidized rates. Details about the fees can be found at: http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/about/fees/
Publicity
========
The posters can be downloaded from the website : http://scipy.in/scipyin/2010/publicity/
Contact
=======
Feel free to email the organizers at info@fossee.in

After all that awesome time I had during SAGE DAYS 25, I still feel there is something I haven't done. There were many people asking about how to use SAGE. Although they have seen how to use notebook, they are not sure how to run a sage notebook server. This blog post is intended to enable a layman start with using sage.

This blog post will be in three parts

• How to get sage
• How to use sage on the terminal
• How to start and use a notebook server

How to get sage:

Visit this link and get the corresponding binary. Follow the instructions for extracting the binary. I now assume your sage is in a directory called SAGE_DIR.
Ex: my SAGE_DIR is /home/nishanth/sage-4.5/
From now on, where ever I use SAGE_DIR please replace it with your sage directory.

How to use sage on the terminal:

Using sage interactively:
First go to your terminal and do "cd SAGE_DIR"
then do "./sage"
it takes a while and gives you sage prompt. Which means you will see "sage:" on your terminal waiting for input.
This is the sage shell and you can type your sage code interactively line by line over here.

Running a file that contains sage code:
Simply pass the path to that file as an argument. In simple words, also type the path to file after you do "./sage"
Ex: ./sage /home/myscripts/mycode.sage

If the filename ends in ".sage" the file is run as a sage code. If the filename ends in ".py" the code is run as a pure python code.

How to start and use a notebook server:

Use notebook at home:
type "notebook()" on the sage prompt and it starts the server. Go to your web browser and open the url "http://localhost:8000" and go ahead.

Use notebook as a server for academic purposes:
A single instance of server can handle only around 30 - 40 simultaneous connections. So you might want to run multiple instances and just notebook() will not suffice.

Use notebook(interface="", port=<your desired port>, directory=path_where_to_store, timeout=120)

Ex: notebook(interface="", port=8080, directory="/home/nishanth/sagenb_8080", timeout=60)

This server can be accessed by "http://<server ip>:8080"

To run next instance, use a different port and different directory.

Date - 1st April, 2010
Venue - A1-A2, Mathematics Dept., & KRESIT, IIT-B
The session started at 10:40 AM with a brief welcome to all the participants from Prof. Kannan Moudgalya. Then each of the participants gave a brief introduction of themselves to everybody assembled. The participants mainly consisted of B.Ed teachers and student-teachers from Mumbai and near-by areas. A few of us from the FOSSEE team, Vivek Khurana, and Ganesh from SPACE were the only programmers, who were participating. Dr. J. Shah and Dr. Manojendu, domain experts for Netlogo and Geogebra, respectively, were present to help and guide the participants.
This was followed by a short talk by Prof. Kannan highlighting the importance of Spoken Tutorials for a country like India. He started with a short demonstration on how simple it is to make a spoken tutorial. Using this, he highlighted, what he felt were the advantages of a spoken tutorial. Firstly, a well made spoken tutorial captures everything and doesn't leave anything to the imagination of a viewer, and eliminates problems of mis-communication. Secondly, it can be
prepared using relatively easily available equipment - A PC, and a mic. Thirdly, anybody can do it - from kids to housewives to retired people. Hence, it is a highly scalable thing. The talk lasted for about 20 mins and put the workshop in perspective and was a nice way to start.
Next was a talk by Nancy, giving the participants a guide on how to write a script for a spoken tutorial. Most of the things were common sense, but it's nice to have them stated explicitly. Notes [slightly modified] that I took during the workshop are at the end. This presentation also lasted for about 20mins.
This was followed by a talk by Dr. J. Shah on Netlogo. He showed a small demonstration of Netlogo and followed it up with a list of ideas he had for spoken tutorials. He also shared a few scripts that he had started working on, but, not completed. Next, Dr. Manojendu gave an introduction to Geogebra and a few ideas for spoken tutorials. It was already noon, by the time we reached the end of the talks and the hands-on part began.
The participants were then divided into groups of three and they chose one topic each, from the pool of ideas to make spoken-tutorials on. We then began working on our scripts. Our group chose, "Introduction to Arrays" in numpy as the topic. I already had some outlines ready, which we worked on improving. It was good to have a novice in our team, who could review the script. But, this tutorial being a part of a series of tutorials was a slight problem for us. We had about 45mins
before we dispersed for lunch.
Post lunch, we had another half-an-hour to forty-five minutes to review finalize our script, and try out some rehearsals of recording. Then began the series of live recordings. Each of the teams were given an opportunity to record their scripts in-front of all the participants. It was an exciting thing for the participants and they were enthusiastic. But, a few of us felt, this was a bit too long and more time could've been spent in the script finalization and rehearsal stage with more critical feedback being given to the participants.
The workshop ended with a few participants giving their feedback. On the whole it was an educative workshop, but I would've liked more critical feedback, with fewer specimens.

• Steps for script writing
  1. Identify the need
  2. Prepare
     1. familiarize self
     2. test all the features
  3. Focus on a key feature that you want to demonstrate
  4. Choice of words
     1. Use short sentences
     2. Use simple words - avoid jargon
     3. Use a combination of screen-cast and slides
     4. Be specific
  5. Follow a pedagogical approach
     1. Brief intro
     2. OS compatibility, system requirements
     3. Show screen-shots of download sites?
     4. Mention pre-requisite knowledge
        Ideally that material should be available as another spoken tutorial
     5. Write ALL steps
     6. REMEMBER - Visual medium - SHOW
  6. Review the script for accuracy and clarity
     1. Ask a novice
     2. Improve until novice can follow until novice can follow
        without help
  7. Review the script for grammar
  8. Time duration
     10 minutes
  9. File size
     ~ 10MB
• Narration - Dos and Don'ts
  1. Speaking
     • politely
     • do not give orders
     • make it a pleasant experience
     • speak naturally
     • speak clearly and slowly
  2. Tips to cut external noise
     • closed room with min. disturbance
     • switching off the fan helps
     • close windows
  3. Dummy rec. for 2-3 mins to finalize rec. parameters
     • predict file-size
     • check clarity of audio narration and video
     • full-length dummy narration will help improve tone of
       voice and pronunciation
  4. Final narration
     • do it in one go
       • keeps tone of voice uniform
       • reduce editing time
  5. While dubbing
     • if possible, remove original audio stream
     • else, just add another stream (not more than 2 streams)
     • audio-video sync
     • meaning should be same
     • file size remains (almost) same
     • recording dimensions

Here is a link to a post by Nancy on the event.

When we first opened the registrations to the students, we didn't expect such an overwhelming response. We had close to 90 registrations in 2 days. By the time we reached Jaipur the number had increased to a whopping 143! It seemed like students had registered over night too. We were a bit concerned about the number since the lab could accommodate a little over 70 people. Thankfully the number of people who actually turned up were close to 75. We had a handful of post graduate cum faculty participants as well coming in for the sessions.

We saw a consistent drop in the number of participants as the sessions progressed. For the post break session the number had come down to 66. Post lunch sessions saw the numbers further come down to 57. But those who remained showed good interest in whatever was being taught. The second day turn up was 42 and almost all of them remained till the end. The response on the second day was better than the first since all of them present were genuinely interested.

The lab structure there was the best we have seen so far. It was ideal in the sense that it had 60 systems all in good condition, all facing on the same side. The lab was spacious and well ventilated, although it required more cooling(thanks to the Jaipur summer). We felt the need for a mic since our voices weren't reaching the last few rows.

One interesting that we observed here was that the participants were quite comfortable with typing and making fewer mistakes. As a result we saw that few people had written close to 300 lines of code in a day without having closed the IPython shell even once.

The quiz performance here was the best among all the workshops we have conducted till date. There were a few of them who were quick enough to try out some of the quiz questions on the IPython shell immediately as well :-P.For the first time we saw people scoring full marks on the quizzes. One guy, Rishi Mehta, requires a special mention since he scored full on all the three quizzes we conducted.

We did skip a few sessions due to lack of time and little interest since they had little relevance to Computer Science students. But in the end the workshop turned out to be a very satisfactory experience. The feedback seems to be very positive. We hope the students continue to show interest in Python and contact us and stay in touch by telling us how they have been working on Python.

Pics from the workshop:

The SEES Book Application is a simple application similar to django book and hg book. It has the features that enables a user to comment on all the paragraphs of the book.
Although the application uses reST format for editing, it converts it into a docbook intermediate. This docbook intermediate can be used for publishing the book into pdf format. Thus this app makes a great idea for web publishing and thus provides a discussion framework for various parties involved in creation of a book.

At the heart of it is a web application written in django that keeps a database of all the comments made on different paragraphs. Since the database of the number of paragraphs can change over the course of writing the book, it is kept in the form of python dictionary which is created every time the book is rebuilt. The commenting system is handled using javascript similar to django book.

Since we need to take care of the dynamic nature of the book during the discussion period, there is a build system for the book. The build system ensures that comments are not lost over the course of the discussion. It uses common tools like xsltproc and rst2xml/docbook converter in python docutils. xsltproc is used to convert xml/docbook to html using some xsl stylesheet. There is a tremendous scope for improvement in the app. It requires code refactoring, beautifying and making the code more readable and configurable . Generalization and making it more applicable to other similar use cases. First of all the docbook converter is specific for this project. A generalized docbook converter in docutils will be great . Their is work being done on in the docutils sandbox. Also a workflow design that automates indexing of chapters is required. A more generalized app can become a framework for book publication related discussions.

The url to the application is http://fossee.in/review/ and the code for the application is available at http://fossee.in/hg/SEES-hacks/