Jupyter Community Workshops
We are thrilled to announce the Jupyter Community workshops for the first half of 2019. We had 16 proposals submitted, each of which represents a tremendous amount of effort and opportunity for community growth. Thank you for your proposals!
We were able to fund the following seven proposals. The dates, venues, participants, and specific agenda for each workshop are being finalized in the near future. If you are interested in participating in one of the workshops, please contact the organizers (tentative locations and contact emails are in the descriptions below).
Introduction to Python Coding for Kids, Parents and Teachers
England; Tariq Rashid (CoderDojo Cornwall, Data Science Cornwall and Algorithmic Art (London)); [email protected]
Cornwall, in the southwest of England is primarily a rural and coastal region, where traditional industries are not as prevalent as they were in the past. The technology sector is small but hugely enthusiastic and growing. A key challenge for the region is to develop a sustainable technology ecosystem. That means providing young people with pathways into hugely rewarding fields like data science. There is growing effort, mostly voluntary, to inspire children to learn to code, and provide teachers and parents with support to do this. Although a very wide range of technologies and ideas are covered — from creative coding on the web to programming hardware microcontrollers — a critical gap in many resources for young learners are the tools and techniques used by modern developers and data scientists. Our project will start to address this gap by providing free workshops across Cornwall introducing children to working with the Jupyter notebook, a simple but powerful tool, suitable for learning Python as well as gaining experience with data science concepts and techniques. These young people will not just gain skills and experience attractive to employers, but perhaps also discover a talent or a passion they didn’t know they had. And of course, all the learning resources, example projects and code, and supporting videos we develop and test will be made available on the web for everyone to use.
Dashboarding in the Jupyter ecosystem
Europe; Maarten Breddels (independent/freelance), Sylvain Corlay (QuantStack), Pascal Bugnion (ASI Data Science), Vidar Tonaas Fauske (Simula Research Laboratory), Alexandre Gramfort (INRIA); [email protected], [email protected]
The Jupyter ecosystem has great tools for teaching, exploration and development. Dashboards allow a user to interact with a kernel with interactive controls, plots, maps, etc., and allow researchers and data scientists to share their results with students, with their peers, and with the general public. Currently, users of Jupyter are (mostly) forced towards other Python or R libraries or they have to develop using frontend technologies like JavaScript directly.
There are existing early technologies that allow serving dashboards based off notebooks, most notably voila. The goal of this workshop is to gather core Jupyter widgets developers, members of the community and users with experience in dashboarding to bring dashboarding to a level where it can be used by all members of the Jupyter ecosystem. Ultimately, we envisage users being able to develop and deploy dashboards entirely within the Jupyter ecosystem.
Jupyter Server Design and Roadmap Workshop
California; Luciano Resende (IBM); [email protected]
The Jupyter Notebook backend capabilities are evolving quickly and a new project, Jupyter Server, aims to become the new backend for Jupyter web applications such as the Jupyter notebook and JupyterLab.
The goal of this workshop is to foster collaboration between different projects and community contributors working on Jupyter server-side functionality and have a broader discussion about design and future roadmap for the project. We will take the opportunity to also ensure that Jupyter Community use cases for pluggability and extensibility are being properly considered (e.g. extension points to enable kernel as a service, remote kernels, etc).
Jupyter for Scientific User Facilities and High-Performance Computing
Berkeley, California; Dan Allan (BNL), Debbie Bard (LBNL), Shane Canon (LBNL), Shreyas Cholia (LBNL), Chris Holdgraf (BIDS — UC Berkeley), Kelly Rowland (LBNL), Rollin Thomas (LBNL); [email protected], [email protected]
Scientists love Jupyter because it combines documentation, visualization, data analytics, and code into a document they can share, modify, and even publish. What about using Jupyter to control experiments in real-time, or steer complex simulations on a supercomputer, or even connect experiments to high-performance computing for real-time feedback? How does one reach outside the notebook to corral external data and computational resources in a seamless manner? Our workshop will bring together Jupyter developers, scientists from experimental and observational science facilities, and supercomputing center staff to elevate Jupyter as the preeminent interface for distributed data-intensive workflows. We will identify best practices, share lessons learned, clarify gaps and challenges in supporting deployments, and work on new tools to make Jupyter easier to use for big science.
Building upon the Jupyter Kernel Protocol
Europe; Sylvain Corlay (QuantStack); [email protected]
The Jupyter kernel protocol is one of the main extension points of the Jupyter ecosystem. Dozens of language kernels have been developed by the community, and these languages can now leverage other components of the stack, such as the notebook, the console, and interactive widgets.
The goal of this workshop is to foster collaboration between kernel developers, including the development of common tools for testing and supporting all aspect of the protocol. Beyond the currently supported messages, we will discuss potential improvements and additions, such as the support of debugging messages, the ability to parameterize kernelspecs, and common testing infrastructures.
Nbgrader Hackathon/Code Sprint
Scotland; James Slack (University of Edinburgh); [email protected]
The University of Edinburgh will be hosting a three-day community event focused using Jupyter notebooks within teaching. The core aspect of this event will be a Hackathon focused on adding improvements, fixes and extra documentation for the nbgrader extension. Alongside this, there is a plan to run introductory open workshops for using Jupyter in teaching, targeting local communities with some exposure to Jupyter as well as those new to Jupyter. Our key aim will be to improve the existing features within nbgrader. This will allow the existing Jupyter user community and new users to adopt and use this as an assessment tool alongside Jupyter notebooks. By enthusing our existing local Jupyter users to be more involved with the wider community and inviting new users to join, we will be increasing the diversity of opinion and experience within the Jupyter user community.
South American Jupyter Developers
Argentina; Damián Avila; [email protected]
The Jupyter community is the vital force that builds and sustains the Jupyter ecosystem. In our workshop, we will begin building an active South American Jupyter community. This will greatly increase the diversity of our current community, bringing not only new ideas but also new Jupyter developments and solutions to solve some of the problems we see in this part (and other parts) of the world.
We will start this process with an event bringing people from some parts of South America to Córdoba, Argentina to work/sprint in some of the pieces of the Jupyter ecosystem. Our plan is to plant seeds to disseminate the Jupyter ecosystem in different regions of South America, accelerating the South American Jupyter community growth.
Conclusion
We are very grateful to each of the organizers, and each person who submitted a proposal, which represent a significant commitment to building the Jupyter community. We are also grateful for the generous support Bloomberg provided that made these workshops possible.
