First Indian SciPy Conference held in Trivandrum

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scipy 2009

The International SciPy Conference was inaugurated by Dr Travis Oliphant, Vice President of Enthought Inc. (USA) at Trivandrum on 12 December 2009.

Dr Travis Oliphant appreciated the initiative taken by Kerala in organising SciPy in India. He traced the history of SciPy and the contributions of programmers over the last decade. He spoke about the potential of SciPy and hoped that India would contribute significantly to its evolution.

R Narayanan, former Vice-President, TCS presided over the inaugural function. He noted how the programming paradigm had changed over the years with the advent of high level programming languages. These paradigms have made programming easier and accessible to people from various disciplines, he said.

Jarrod Millman, Director of Computing for UC Berkeley's Neuroscience Institute gave a short introduction to the conference. Prof. Elizabeth Sherly, Director-Acting, IIITM-K offered felicitations. Dr. V Sasi Kumar, Coordinator, SPACE welcomed the partcipants and Dr. Prabhu Ramachandran, IIT Bombay, gave a vote of thanks.

Over 170 delegates including teachers, students and practitioners from all over the country attended the conference.

Presentations on 12& 13 December 2009

Asokan Pichai, Dr Travis Oliphant, Jarrod Millman, Dr Prabhu Ramachandran, Prof. Kannan, Moudgalya Chandrasekhar Kaushik, Praneeth Bodduluri, Suryajith Chillara, Debayan Banerjee, Abhishek Pathak, Senthil Kumaran, Kumaran M, Chris Burns, David Cournapeau, Farhat Habib, Akshay Srinivasan and Deepak Nath presented papers at the conference.

Tutorials on 14&15 December 2009

Tutorials were aimed at people who want to learn to use NumPy/SciPy for their scientific and numerical computation to solve scientific and engineering problems in their domains.

Session 1 by Asokan Pichai started with a tutorial on how to use Python for all plotting needs. Rather than introducing Python as another high level language, the first day's sessions focussed on introducing it as a problem solving tool. Session 2 was on plotting experimental data using Python.

On the second day of tutorials, Python was introduced as a programming language rather than just a problem solving tool. Delegates were made familiar with the basic as well as the advanced levels of programming using Python.

To add fun to the tutorials, a quiz was conducted among the delegates. Winners were selected from teachers, students and professionals.

Sprint on 16-17 December 2009

Sprint was held on the last two days of the conference so that participants can contribute to software, hack on, develop, fix bugs of scipy/numpy.

SciPy.in 2009 was organised by Free and Open Source Software in Science and Engineering Education (FOSSEE) project, IIT Bombay and SPACE. It was co-organized by IC-FOSS, Government of Kerala and SIG-FOSS of CSI.
 

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