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Annexure ‘F’
Recommendations of Conference on Scientific Computing Using
Python 2009
The first version of Indian Scipy Conference was inaugurated on 12th December by Dr.
Prabhu Ramachandran, Dr. Travis Oliphant (President, Enthought) , Mr. R Narayan
(Vice President TCS Learning and Development), Prof. Elizabeth Sherly and Mr. Jarrod
Millman in Technopark, Trivandrum . The Conference was organized by FOSSEE,
Space-Kerala and SIG-FOSS. The aim of the conference was to create awareness and
spread the use of Python in the Indian Scientific community. Also it tried to get the
developers from India and abroad to tell about how they were using Scipy and Python
for their research needs. They also brainstormed and sprinted on improving scipy
documentation and code.
Mr. R. Narayan, former Vice-President TCS (Learning and development) started the
conference by talking about object-oriented programming language paradigm and how
high level languages like Python have made programming more accessible to people
from different backgrounds. Then Prof. Elizabeth Sherly talked about importance of
FOSS in Education.
Dr. Travis Oliphant of Enthought and one of the chief architects of Numpy kicked off the
talks about how he started using Python for his research needs in the year 1998. He
traced the development of Numpy starting from Jim Hugunin's work on numeric. He also
talked how open source development works and multiple people from different
geographical locations collaborated to create Numpy by contributing small projects they
were developing. He also showed that how Scipy and his company Enthought were
working in diverse fields like embedded systems to Oil industry and food industry.
Prof. Kannan Moudgalya talked about his work with spoken tutorials at IIT Bombay. He
shared his vision of freeing computer education through FOSS tools and spoken
tutorials delivered in all the regional languages. Spoken tutorials could be used to bridge
the digital divide. After that Chandrashekhar Kaushik talked about his Python based
SPH framework and how it can be used to do simulations of particle interactions.
The second day’s talks were started by Christopher Burns from University of California,
Berkley. He talked about NiPY, an open source neuro imaging tool developed in
Python. NiPY project is an environment for the analysis of structural and functional
neuro imaging data. He believed that Scipy and Python can function as great tools for
scientific computing and hoped that more scientists and engineers will start using
Python. David Cournapeau, the maintainer of Numpy project talked about the progress
made in building numpy on different distributions and the feature set that will be added
in the next few versions. He also introduced people to toydist a build system he was
writing which tried to rectify the problems in building code using setuptools and distutils
.The Chaco talk by Dr. Travis Oliphant on the second day got a lot of interest among
people because of its ability to create very useful and interactive plots. He showed the
power of Chaco by plotting the frequency of his voice using Chaco. Farhat Habib of
IISER talked about using Python in Data Mining and Data Visualization especially in
relation to gene regulation. Dr. Prabhu Ramachandran introduced people to Mayavi, a
3D visualization tool written by him. He also introduced Sage, open source
mathematical software. He showed Sage notebook's features like solving symbolic
expressions and creating plots within the notebook. He lso told people about the
upcoming Sage days 25, India in August. In the end he thanked all the speakers,
organizers and participants for making Scipy India successful.