Jarrod Millman -
- - - -Programming is becoming increasingly important to scientific activity. -As its importance grows, the need for better software tools becomes more -and more central to scientific practice. However, many fields of science -rely on badly written, poorly documented, and insufficiently tested -codebases. Moreover, scientific software packages often implement only the -approaches and algorithms needed or promoted by the specific lab where the -software was written. - -In this talk, I will illustrate this situation by discussing some of the -weaknesses of the software ecosystem for neuroimaging analysis circa 2004. -I will then describe how several of my colleagues and I are attempting -to rectify this situation with a project called Neuroimaging in Python -(http://nipy.org). Specifically, I will -discuss the approach we've taken (e.g., using Python) and the lessons -we've learned. -
- - - - - - - -Asim Mittal +
Farhat Habib
@@ -369,27 +330,31 @@Gesture recognition has caught on in a big way, but methods of -integrating it with intuitive control still remain largely -expensive and closed source. -
--This talk aims at combining the IR tracking ability of the -Nintendo Wiimote along with a little scientific computing in -Python (Linux) to create a means of intuitively controlling -applications and the operating system, using gestures drawn in 2D -space using your fingers. -
--This talk is an extension of the work that I have done from my -talk at PyCon India. -
--You can find out more about my work and ongoing research on my -blog: http://baniyakiduniya.blogspot.com +
The use of Python as a language for introducing computing is +becoming increasingly widespread. Here we report out findings +from two years of running an introduction to computing course +with Python as the programming language, and building upon it, +using SciPy as a scientific computing language in a course on +scientific computing.
- ++The course is designed as a general computing course for +introducing computing to first year undergraduate students of +science. We find that a large majority of our incoming students +have no prior exposure to programming and none of the students +had any exposure to Python. Thus, the design of the course is +such that it allows everybody to be brought up to speed with +general programming concepts. Later, the students will later +specialize in varied topics from Biology to pure Mathematics, +thus, the course emphasizes general computing concepts over +specialized techniques. At a second course in Scien- tific +Computing numerical methods are introduced with the aid of +Scipy. The introduction to computing course has been taught +twice in Fall 2009 and 2010 to batches of around 100 students +each. In this paper we report our experience with teaching +Python and student and faculty feedback related to the course. +
@@ -1447,4 +1412,5 @@ + {% endblock content %}