Jupyter Newsletter 5 • July 22, 2016
Jupyter-Related SciPy Talks
“JupyterLab: Building Blocks for Interactive Computing”
Brian Granger and Jason Grout presented to a full house of SciPy attendees an early (alpha) release of the next generation of the Jupyter Notebook application - JupyterLab. The talk covered the overall vision of the system and gave a demo of JupyterLab’s current capabilities, which are rapidly evolving and improving. JupyterLab captures a lot of what we have learned from the usage patterns of the Notebook application over the last five years. We seek to build a clean and robust foundation that will let us offer not only an improved user interface and experience but also a flexible and extensible environment for interactive computing. For links to the talk, slides, and more information, see our blog.
“Diffing and Merging Jupyter Notebooks with nbdime”
Min Ragan-Kelley gave a talk about nbdime, which aims to provide diff and merge tools specifically for notebooks. For diffs, nbdime shows rendered diffs of notebooks so that the user can compare notebook content more efficiently than comparing the raw JSON. Merges performed with nbdime will guarantee a valid notebook as a result, even in the event of conflicts.
“Reproducible, One Button Workflows with the Jupyter Notebook and SCons”
In this talk, Jess Hamrick introduces nbflow - a helpful workflow tool to develop analysis code in the Jupyter notebook while managing complex dependencies between analyses. Nbflow integrates a Python-based build system (SCons) with the Jupyter Notebook, enabling researchers to build sophisticated, complex analysis pipelines quickly and entirely within notebooks while still maintaining a “one-button workflow” to execute all analyses, in the correct order, from a single command.
“Diversity Luncheon”
We also heard from Carol Willing at the Diversity and Inclusion Luncheon, where she shared her experience on why mentoring is key to improving diversity and her insight into what makes a good mentor: show up, listen, ask questions, act, and recharge.
Other notable talks from Jupyter contributors include “JupyterHub as an Interactive Supercomputing Gateway,” presented by Michael Milligan,
“Labs in the Wild: Teaching Signal Processing Using Wearables & Jupyter Notebooks” by Demba Ba, and “Sharing Reproducible Environments with Binder” from Andrew Osheroff.
Dashboard and Declarative Widget Projects Graduating from Jupyter Incubator
The jupyter-declarativewidgets extension enables users to create interactive areas of the Notebook that connect to functions and data on the kernel. It works on top of Python, Scala and R.
In conjunction with the jupyter-dashboard extension and related sub-projects, it is possible to turn Notebooks into full-featured dashboards and applications.
The jupyter-dashboards extension lets users arrange notebook outputs and widgets in grid and report-like layouts. It is the first of three capabilities in the Jupyter Incubator Dashboards effort and an excellent complement to the jupyter-declarativewidgets.
The dashboard project developers recently proposed making the extension a top-level Jupyter project. Give it a try and provide your feedback on the incorporation proposal.
Design Driven Development with the Jupyter Cal Poly Interns
This past May, Jupyter’s Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus hired eight full-time interns for the summer, including one business, four engineering, and three design students. They have been working in two sub-teams (named IO and Callisto, after some of Jupiter’s moons) on projects to improve JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, and the Jupyter.org website. Since joining the project, they have been working to master a workflow for design driven development, starting with research and user testing, then redesigning and prototyping. During the SciPy conference in Austin, Texas this past week, the intern teams conducted 30 in-person usability tests with the other attendees. View the team here: https://github.com/orgs/jupytercalpoly/people.
Featured Contributors
Fernando Pérez (@fperez_org) is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a founding investigator of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, created in 2013. He received a PhD in particle physics, followed by postdoctoral research in applied mathematics, developing numerical algorithms. Today, his research focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, literate computing, and reproducible research. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead its evolution into Project Jupyter. He regularly lectures about scientific computing and data science, and is a member of the Python Software Foundation as well as a founding member of the NumFOCUS Foundation. He is the recipient of the 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation.
Farica Carroll is a User Interface and User Experience Designer for Jupyter at Cal Poly. She is a sophomore Graphic Communications major concentrating in Web and Digital Media. Prior to working with Jupyter, she worked on redesigning various web pages for startups at Hackers and Founders located in Silicon Valley. At Jupyter, she is working on team IO to help redesign the interface of JupyterLab and the Jupyter Notebook. You can find her on GitHub as @faricacarroll.
NGCM Workshop in Southampton
Min Ragan-Kelley and Thomas Kluyver taught a two day workshop on Jupyter and IPython at the NGCM (next generation computational modelling) summer academy in June. PhD students from around the UK came to Southampton for the week-long course, which included topics such as data analysis with pandas, 3D visualisation with VTK, and GPU programming with CUDA. They hope to be invited back in 2017 to give an updated version of the workshop.
Events
JupyterHub Mini-Workshop (July 22)
The purpose of the workshop is to provide a collection of short talks highlighting various deployment use cases and tools for JupyterHub, coming both from regulars of the project and the broader community. https://github.com/jupyter/jupyterhub-2016-workshop
Broadening Participation in Data Mining Workshop/BPDM2016 (Aug 12–13)
This year’s BPDM workshop will span two days and include keynotes, panels, technical tutorials, mentoring activities, and a keynote by Fernando Pérez. http://www.dataminingshop.com/web/
JupyterDay Atlanta (August 13)
JupyterDay ATL is the first official Jupyter event in the Southeast. It will be hosted at the Georgia Tech Research Institute Conference Center in the heart of Atlanta. Join us for a day of code, community, and collaboration with open source interactive computing in any of the Jupyter languages. https://jupyterday-atlanta-2016.github.io/.
PyBay-SF (August 19–21)
PyBay is an intimate version of the highly successful PyCon conference. It’s a weekend gathering for the Bay Area’s Python community to learn, share, hack, and have fun. It will also feature talks from Jamie Whitacre and Matthias Bussonnier. http://www.pybay.com/
EuroSciPy (August 23–27)
The EuroSciPy meeting is a cross-disciplinary gathering focused on the use and development of the Python language in scientific research. This event will bring together both users and developers of scientific tools, as well as academic research and state of the art industry.
Latest Developer Meeting: 07/19/2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzugwIwaVlg&feature=youtu.be
