The Center for Data and Computing welcomes all University of Chicago students (undergraduate, masters, and PhD) to register for a roundtable discussion on Monday, October 7th, from 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. with Fernando Pérez (UC Berkeley, Project Jupyter). The roundtable is a unique opportunity, open to students only, to engage with one of the leading voices in open software research, innovation, and community-building.

RSVP’s are required as we expect this to be a full event. Please also join us for an additional event with Dr. Pérez, his Distinguished Speaker Series lecture, on Tuesday October 8th from 12:30-1:30pm (RSVP here). Both events will take place in the John Crerar Library building, Room 390.

Scientific Open Source Software: Meat and Bits But Not Papers. Is it Real Work?

Open source software is now the backbone of computation across the sciences and increasingly education. Yet the creation of scientific software is not well recognized as part of the enterprise of science in terms of training, career paths, intellectual recognition, organizational support, or funding. In this talk, I’ll explore the challenges of this contradictory situation, from the perspective of someone who has spent almost 20 years building open source software and communities. I have lived (often precariously) a dual life of “real academic” and of open source developer and advocate, working on IPython, Project Jupyter and the Scientific Python ecosystem since 2001.

I will provide an overview of Project Jupyter, including its intellectual core, the open source community context that surrounds it, and some of its impact. This will help frame the second part of the talk, where I’ll try to open a conversation on the social and organizational challenges of creating and sustaining open, collaborative communities in the structure of research and education. The scientific, technical and community dynamics of projects like Jupyter presents interesting challenges in the context of traditional scientific incentives (funding, publishing, hiring and promotion, etc.) I’ll briefly outline some of these but will mostly focus on some ideas that I hope can move the conversation forward in productive ways.

A weekly seminar series on topics on machine learning co-organized by the University of Chicago Department of Computer Science and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Fall 2019: Fridays at 10:30

Friday, Oct. 11, 2019 in TTIC room 526: Peter Bartlett, UC-Berkeley

Friday, Oct. 18, 2019 in Crerar room 390: Madeleine Udell, Cornell

Friday, Oct. 25, 2019 in TTIC room 526: Shay Moran, Technion

Friday, Nov. 1, 2019 in Crerar room 390: Ohad Shamir, Weizmann

Friday, Nov. 8, 2019 in TTIC room 526: Maxim Raginsky, UIUC

Friday, Nov. 15, 2019 in Crerar 390: TBD

Friday, Nov. 22, 2019 in TTIC 526: Ramya Vinayak, University of Washington

Friday, Nov. 29, 2019: Thanksgiving break

Friday, Dec. 6, 2019 in TTIC 526: Zhaoran Wang, Northwestern

Friday, Dec. 13, 2019: NeurIPS

CDAC Discovery Grants support multidisciplinary research projects that have the potential for high-impact research breakthroughs or new technological innovations. See funded examples from our previous Discovery Grant cycle here.

The goal of this event is to provide potential Collaborative Research Project applicants to the Autumn 2019 cycle with preliminary, informal feedback on their proposals ideas from members of the CDAC steering committee. Feedback will be provided directly after each 3-minute presentation, and a written summary of feedback will be sent to presenters after the event. After the presentations, all attendees will be free to converse and network with one another for the rest of the event.

Attend this event to:

• Learn more about the CDAC Discovery Grants.
• Gain early feedback on your proposal idea.
• Meet potential collaborators and student researchers, as well as other people within the data science community.

We encourage applicants with PI status to register to give a 3-minute presentation focused on your idea. RSVPs for all attendees — presenters and general audience members — are due by Friday October 11th. A confirmation of the proposal presentations will be sent to all presenters by Monday, October 14th. Presenters are encouraged but not required to use the slide template here.

For more information about the Discovery Grants, review cycle deadlines and criteria, and access to the RFP, please see the call for proposals announcement. The proposer’s day event is open to all faculty, students and staff from UChicago and TTIC.