Download Conference on Scientific Computing Using Python

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.