Advanced Scientific Programming in Python

a Summer School by the G-Node, and the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, UK 

Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved, only few scientists have been trained to use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques and best practices which are standard in the industry, but especially tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. Lectures are devised to be interactive and to give the students enough time to acquire direct hands-on experience with the materials. Students will work in pairs throughout the school and will team up to practice the newly learned skills in a real programming project — an entertaining computer game.

We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist.

This school is targeted at Master or PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python and of a version control system such as git, subversion, mercurial, or bazaar is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python and/or git should work through the proposed introductory material before the course. 

We are striving hard to get a pool of students which is international and gender-balanced.

You can apply online: https://python.g-node.org 

Application deadline: 23:59 UTC, May 15, 2016.
Be sure to read the FAQ before applying.


Participation is for free, i.e. no fee is charged! Participants however should take care of travel, living, and accommodation expenses by themselves. Travel grants may be available.


Date & Location
September 5—11, 2016. Reading, UK

Program
- Best Programming Practices
• Best practices for scientific programming
• Version control with git and how to contribute to open source projects with GitHub
• Best practices in data visualization

- Software Carpentry
• Test-driven development
• Debugging with a debugger
• Profiling code

- Scientific Tools for Python
• Advanced NumPy

- Advanced Python
• Decorators
• Context managers
• Generators

- The Quest for Speed
• Writing parallel applications
• Interfacing to C with Cython
• Memory-bound problems and memory profiling
• Data containers: storage and fast access to large data

- Practical Software Development
• Group project

Preliminary Faculty
• Francesc Alted, freelance consultant, author of PyTables, Spain
• Pietro Berkes, Enthought Inc., Cambridge, UK
• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
• Eilif Muller, Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
• Juan Nunez-Iglesias, Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Rike-Benjamin Schuppner, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
• Bartosz Teleńczuk, European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience, CNRS, Paris, France
• Stéfan van der Walt, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, UC Berkeley, CA, USA
• Nelle Varoquaux, Centre for Computational Biology Mines ParisTech, Institut Curie, U900 INSERM, Paris, France
• Tiziano Zito, freelance consultant, Germany

Organizers
For the German Neuroinformatics Node of the INCF (G-Node) Germany:
• Tiziano Zito, freelance consultant, Germany
• Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, Fairfax, USA
• Jakob Jordan, Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-6), Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany

For the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading UK:
• Etienne Roesch, Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics, University of Reading, UK

Website: https://python.g-node.org
Contact: python-info@g-node.org


Kind regards,

Etienne

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Dr. Etienne B. Roesch
Lecturer in Cognitive Science
University of Reading