Jupyter Blog - Lorena A Barba

Omoju Miller

2020-09-29T13:44:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Omoju Miller

Omoju Miller is Technical Advisor to the CEO at GitHub, where she was previously a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. She has a PhD in computer science education from UC Berkeley and an MSc degree in Intelligent Systems from University of Memphis. While a PhD candidate, Omoju worked at Google, co-leading the non-profit computer science education portfolio and helping launch several initiatives, including Made with Code, a program aimed at increasing the participation of girls in computing. She was also member of a team that won a White House hackathon on data and education, the Education Datapalooza, and later had the opportunity to advise the Presidential Innovation Fellows initiative on aspects of diversity and inclusion.

In her first post at GitHub, she worked on building recommendation engines targeting developers’ engagement in open source projects. With a long-time interest in cognitive science and computational thinking, the allure of working with a data set of millions of interacting programmers drew her to GitHub. In her new role, she is no longer narrowly focused on machine learning and data products. Instead, she has a view encircling the end-to-end experience of users on a platform that serves over 40 million users and provides critical infrastructure.

As part of her doctoral work, Omoju developed HipHopathy, a learning module in data science and natural language processing using rap lyrics. She wanted to give cultural relevance to introductory computing for young learners and show them how data science and programming could be used to explore the rich content in this artistic form. The module was included as part of the on edX MOOC, The Beauty and Joy of Computing, which launched in 2015 with over 20,000 learners. In her dissertation, she investigated how this learning module impacted student retention or attrition, particularly affecting historically under-represented students. Her work has deep implications for the design of inclusive computational science courses.

Signing Omoju Miller’s dissertation @home - HipHopathy, A Socio-Curricular Study of Introductory Computer Science

— Alice M. Agogino (@agogino), December 29, 2015

“Computation is a broad thing, and it has enough room to accommodate every single person. […] Computation applied to any field enhances that field and takes that field to the next level,” declared Omoju in her TEDx San Francisco talk entitled: “The myth of innate ability in tech.” She invites us all to be part of the new revolution, changing the world around us with AI and data science. And she quashes the myth of innate ability saying that it’s something invented to make the privileged feel better and as a way to justify the lack of representation of certain groups in the field. Her story of growth in the tech world is proof, from her early years in Nigeria, then coming to Memphis, Tennessee as a teenager and enrolling in an accounting degree, only to be gripped by fascination with the internet. After switching her major to computer science, she took a class on Expert Systems, and the rest is history. She tells the story in her blog post, #20YearsACoder.

I met Omoju while on my sabbatical stay at UC Berkeley — introduced by her advisor, Prof. Alice Agogino — and we had a memorable long lunch filled with conversation. We shared our common interest in computational thinking and widespread educational achievements via computing in context. I have since then witnessed her meteoric rise in the world of technology, and cannot wait to see how far she will continue to fly. With her humble attitude and profound thinking, I’m sure the JupyterCon community is in for a treat with her keynote.

Blowing each other’s minds in conversation with @omojumiller

— Lorena Barba @labarba@fosstodon.org (@LorenaABarba), May 25, 2016

Announcing keynote speakers and researching about them to write these features has been one of the joys of my role as the General Chair. I hope you enjoy reading about these wonderful people who will gift us with their time and thoughts!

Other keynote speakers at JupyterCon2020:

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

The JupyterCon schedule of tutorials and talks is published. Join us!

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan

2020-08-16T20:15:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan demonstrating her DIY light board

Lucy is an assistant professor of statistics at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She previously was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she worked with Prof. Jeffrey Leek. Before starting her PhD in biostatistics at Vanderbilt University, Lucy worked as a statistical data analyst at the Washington University School of Medicine.

A co-founder of R-Ladies Nashville, creator of online courses, and developer of several R packages, Lucy is an avid organizer, communicator and member of the R community. In her blog, she writes about statistics in medicine, using and teaching R, and her experience as an early career academic. She co-hosts the Casual Inference podcast with Ellie Murray from Boston University, where they talk about statistics, data science and epidemiology.

Lucy and her colleagues at Wake Forest are embracing the challenge of teaching during a pandemic, showing both creativity and collegiality with peer-to-peer communities for learning how to teach online. In the photo above you see her with her self-made light board for preparing class videos. She teaches statistical modeling and statistical learning, and I can’t wait to watch her videos — I see a rising star in the open education sphere.

She does research in causal inference, observational study methods, and applications of statistics in medicine. In one recent study she collaborated on, the team looked at the risk of opioid therapy for veterans with rheumatoid arthritis and mental health concerns. Another looks at the effectiveness of dressings with collagen on wounds that resist healing. The common thread is applying a deep understanding of statistics to hard problems in health care. It seems today more than ever we need researchers with this focus. To Lucy, “medicine is a data science.”

In her latest project, the team developed a mathematical model to analyze the impact of test-trace-isolate programs on the dynamics of infectious transmission. She then built an application based on this model, ConTESSA (Contact Tracing Evaluation and Strategic Support Application), to support managers of contact-tracing programs. Lucy and her collaborators also created a MOOC to teach about the indicators of performance of a contact-tracing program, how to use the ConTESSA tool to estimate the effect of these indicators on transmission, and how to strategize to increase the impact of the overall program. The MOOC is free on Coursera, and starts today.

In these troubled times of weaponized misinformation, and a global health crisis on a polarized and deeply unequal societal backdrop, the world needs charismatic science communicators like Lucy. Her system for effective statistical communication, shared in her recent talkat the Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM), should be in every student’s curriculum. She teaches us all to be mindful of the audience, adapt our content, and convey data-powered messages so they are both interesting and true.

A tweet by @lucystats, no longer available

I am delighted to shine a spotlight on such a multitalented young educator and researcher, and to introduce her to the Jupyter community. I also can’t wait to learn from her in what no doubt will be an illuminating keynote. She joins the growing list of awesome speakers we’re lining up for JupyterCon 2020:

Stay tuned for our upcoming announcements!

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

Talk and tutorial selections are complete, and authors are being notified. Get ready for the program!

Juan Klopper

2020-08-03T16:01:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Juan Klopper and Lorena Barba in Delft, Holland, for the Global Open Education Conference, April 2018.

Juan Klopper is a medical doctor and surgeon at Groote Schuur Hospital, the academic hospital complex of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and a senior lecturer in surgery. His specialty is emergency surgery, and he heads the hospital’s Acute Care Surgery unit. He is also the Head of Post-Graduate Surgical Research, the Head of Surgical Education, and the Faculty of Health Science representative on the University Senate Committee for Online Education.

An ardent open educator, Juan was recognized with the 2014 Educator Award of the Open Education Consortium, a global network for open education. His first collections of educational videos on YouTube focused on biomathematics, and acute care surgery, but he also created loads of teaching videos on physics and mathematics. At the time, he recorded a course on medical statistics using Excel, but he also ventured into a short set of Python lectures, and then a full-fledged course on Medical Statistics using IPython notebooks. He has since then developed courses on the Julia language, on R for medical statistics, and on Understanding Clinical Research using Google Colab — the latter also a Coursera MOOC that has enrolled more than 85,000 learners. Juan was the first educator from the African Continent to have a course on the Coursera platform.

Juan’s research focus is on improvements of healthcare through data science and mathematics. The unique blend of his decade-long career as an attending surgeon and years as an autodidact of mathematics and programming brings forth inventive projects applying technology to medicine. One uses convolutional neural networks to diagnose hemopneumothorax (air and blood in the chest cavity) in victims with gunshot or stab wounds. Another is looking into the diagnostic accuracy of magnetic resonance imaging for tuberculosis spondylitis in HIV-positive and HIV-negative patients. The surgical research unit that he heads at University of Cape Town has supported more than a hundred master’s and doctoral research projects.

In the resource-constrained environment of South Africa, such research efforts rely heavily on open source software tools. For both teaching and research, open source tools remove barriers to technology in the developing world. A number of initiatives involving and advocating open source software in Sub-Saharan Africa attest to the significant impact it can have in capacity building, public policy implementation, and economic growth.

Juan — not content with saving lives applying his surgical talents — has devoted himself to the open dissemination of knowledge. His motto is “Never stop learning,” and he shares his learning journeys openhandedly with his students and everyone else. I can’t wait to hear what he will share with the JupyterCon community.

Just like our previously announced JupyterCon keynotes — Anima Anandkumar and Jeremy Howard — this is an exciting chance to imagine how far our community can go impacting the world for the better. Oh, the anticipation!

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

Proposals for tutorials, talks and posters are being selected this week!

Jeremy Howard

2020-07-21T17:36:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Jeremy Howard

Jeremy Howard is co-founder of fast.ai, and researcher in residence on medical data science at the University of San Francisco. He is Chief Scientist at platform.ai, and held this role previously at doc.ai and Kaggle, where he was also President. Jeremy is a serial entrepreneur, having founded several successful companies after starting his career in management consulting. His most recent, Enlitic, was the first medical deep learning company, which just one year after its founding in 2014 had raised $15 million in two rounds of funding. He left the company two years after.

An open educator, Jeremy co-authored free courses on deep learning that have reached hundreds of thousands of learners around the world. He also co-authors an open-source library for deep learning called fastai, first released in 2018. The library sits atop PyTorch to provide a consistent interface for deep learning applications to images, text, time series, data frames and more. The second version of the library was announced in February this year with an arXiv preprint. All this work has recently come together as a book, written openly on Jupyter notebooks. Over the span of just a few years, he and fast.ai co-founder Rachel Thomas have done more to expand the reach and understanding of deep-learning technology than many global technology corporations.

Last March, as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading around the world, Jeremy co-founded the #Masks4All campaign. It challenged the global consensus advice at the time on wearing face coverings to protect each other from infection. The campaign is estimated to have reached more than a billion people on social media, and was covered by global news outlets. “This has completely taken over my life,”said Jeremy in an April 1st interview. His June-19 epic tweet-thread reviewing the scientific evidence in support of mask-wearing is a paragon in science communication.

Jeremy has contributed to open source software throughout his career. He both contributed to and helped steer the Perl programming language through authoring requests-for-comments and chairing the Perl6-data working group. Among his latest projects is nbdev, a tool for developing Python libraries using Jupyter as the writing environment for both code and documentation. It empowers users to create hyperlinked documentation, Python modules, tests, and pip-installers, all from Jupyter notebooks, realizing the ideal of Knuth’s literate programming. And expanding the potential of Jupyter as a writing environment for blogging, fastpages facilitates creating Jekyll blog posts on GitHub pages from content source in Jupyter notebooks. The posts can include interactive data visualizations, embed YouTube videos or Twitter cards, and show code snippets in collapsible blocks. Both these projects delight Jupyter enthusiasts with heaps of creative possibilities!

Even if a journalist writing about the impact of #Masks4all dubbed Jeremy a “little-known data scientist,” counting by GitHub stars and Twitter followers, he is really a data-science luminary. You all know him by now, and will be eager to hear him speak to our community in his JupyterCon keynote.

Like our first announced keynote speaker, Anima Anandkumar, Jeremy shines the light of his creative expression in diverse spheres of life and profession. We are thrilled and grateful to them both for allowing JupyterCon to host them!

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

Call for tutorials, talks, and posters extended until July 22nd!

Anima Anandkumar

2020-07-13T20:39:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 keynote speaker announcement

Anima Anandkumar

Anima Anandkumar is Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, and the Director of Machine Learning at NVIDIA. She was the youngest named chair professor at Caltech, has received many awards in a short time span, and has been featured in documentaries and media outlets like PBS, Wired, Forbes, MIT Tech Review and others.

Beyond her star power, Anima is a relentlessly outspoken and influential woman of the times. She has been public about her #MeToo experience at a previous place of work, and she spearheaded the #ProtestNIPS campaign to re-brand the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (now known as NeurIPS). The latter earned her a recognition in the 2018 Good Tech Awards of The New York Times.

She also advocates for responsible use of artificial intelligence, taking a stand specifically against face recognition services sold to law enforcement. This technology is currently still sufficiently inaccurate to be unsafe for use in high-consequence applications, and the product that Amazon made available in 2018, in particular, had high error rates when classifying the gender of dark-skinned women. In an open letter to Amazon, more than two dozen scientists (including Anima) refuted the claims Amazon was making on the scientific evaluation of the technology. Now, the letter has many more signatures, and the Association for Computing Machinery has called for a moratorium on the use of face recognition in high-risk settings.

Anima has a zeal for expanding the reach and understanding of AI in society. With Yisong Yue, she founded in 2018 the AI4science initiative at Caltech, which connects experts in data science and AI with researches across disciplines of science and engineering. She conveys that zeal to the boards of non-profits like #GoBeyondResumes, helping tech with skills-based recruitment, and Behind her Eyes, using virtual reality to combat bias and discrimination.

Nothing less than a trailblazer, her most celebrated contribution to machine learning was devising ways to use tensor algorithms in building statistical models, and having the insight that tensors are the natural mathematical representation for multi-modal data. Nowadays, tensors are everywhere in AI, but in 2014, when she published her most-cited paper on tensor decompositions, they were still obscure. Deep learning was just taking off then!

She collaborated with Jean Kossaifi and others on the release of TensorLy, which provides software support for tensor operations in Python. Its flexible backend allows using NumPy, MXNet, PyTorch, TensorFlow or CuPy to execute the computations efficiently on various hardware platforms, and to use tensor methods in combination with deep learning.

With a prolific and impactful career in academia, in parallel to high-profile positions in industry, one wonders how it is possible for Anima to also be a science communicator and activist for both responsible AI and diversity and inclusion in tech. But she is all these things, and with utmost grace.

Inviting keynote speakers for JupyterCon is both a nerve-racking and gleeful duty for the organizers. Our aspiration is to experience together an unforgettable moment of intellectual joy and inspiration. And that, dear reader, is a guarantee with our first advertised speaker: Professor Anima Anandkumar.

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

Call for tutorials, talks, and posters open until July 20!

JupyterCon Online: more than a conference

2020-06-29T19:25:00+00:00

With glee, on February 7, we announced the return of the Jupyter community conference as a global event to be held in Berlin, Germany, in August. In a burst of enthusiasm, 174 people signed up to review for the technical program (you still can!).

Barely a month later (March 11), the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, tech companies had already made the call to cancel all travel, then Europe became the epicenter of the pandemic.

As we began working on contingency plans and negotiating with the contracted venue, we silently published the JupyterCon website, and the Twitter account fell silent. Now we’re ready to make public our plans for JupyterCon Online to be held October 5–17, replacing the in-person conference this year.

This is our vision for the conference of the future.

The key question is: in the absence of physical presence to celebrate our community, meet new people, and network for professional opportunities, what could be the incentives for attendees, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers to be part of the conference? A sharp focus emerged on career advancement and learning as the motivations.

We developed a vision in which a “conference” is now a learning platform, unconstrained by synchronous schedules or geographical location, coalescing a multitude of mini-events and rad new content, learning experiences, and online social interactions.

The project we developed comprises:

an online learning platform to create courses and organize content, providing user profiles to track learning and earn micro-credentials,
integrations with third-party tools for web conferencing and text-based threaded discussion,
online labs with access to JupyterHub/Binder attached to the content,
beyond just “talks,” content organized as mini-courses with permanent resources attached and ensuing conversation.

The conference of the future convergences with online learning and credentialing.

Conference Program

The technical program for JupyterCon Online will be selected by a team of topic track chairs, informed by volunteer reviewers, from submissions to the NOW OPEN Call for Proposals. Much of the program will be on-demand, but a few important pieces are planned to be live:

Tutorials: consist of prepared written materials and exercises in Jupyter notebooks, pre-recorded video by the instructor, live office hours with participants each day, and text-based discussion. The conference team will create a MOOC-style mini-course from the author-prepared materials. Participants completing the tutorials will receive certificates.
Keynotes: streamed live to YouTube each day, with private backchannel discussions in the JupyterCon Mattermost server, public backchannel on Twitter, and also live, moderated Q&A after the talk.
Regular presentations: pre-recorded, with timed release on YouTube Premiere, backchannel discussions in the private text-based forum, and in public on YouTube and organically on Twitter.
Panels of Speakers: since the regular presentations are pre-recorded, these are an opportunity for the audience to interact live with the speakers. We’ll cluster speakers by topic, for a live broadcast discussion with a moderator, after their pre-recorded presentations aired. Audience can submit questions ahead of time for moderators to choose, and can also ask live.
Posters: these are digital artifacts that can be static or interactive (e.g., Voilà dashboards), plus a pre-recorded 2-min pitch on video.
Live lightning talks: 5-min moderated live presentations, with a text-based backchannel discussion, but no Q&A with speakers.
Birds-of-a-feather: open-forum video chats organized organically among attendees.
Interviews with influencers in the community as an additional draw of activity and discussion. Other live panels not connected to pre-recorded talks (e.g., Q&A with JupyterHub developers).

Part of a larger initiative

I worked with NumFOCUS (where I’m co-chair of the Board of Directors) to develop a wider program that we named NumFOCUS Academy. It will boost the educational mission of the organization, whose signature program is the PyData conference series—also put at risk by the pandemic. We wrote a proposal for funding to the Sloan Foundation for development of a scalable ecosystem consisting of an online learning platform, a JupyterHub server, front-end websites for JupyterCon, PyData and NumFOCUS Academy, and services like e-commerce, single-sign-on, analytics, and so on.

Sloan approved the grant on May 20, making this ambitious project a reality!

The JupyterCon leadership also secured a Platinum sponsorship from OVH Cloud, who will host all infrastructure needs for the first year. (OVH already hosts nbviewer and a large part of MyBinder.)

Our technical partner is IBL Education: they will deploy and support the learning ecosystem, with Open edX as the centerpiece technology. (Read more: What’s Open edX?) IBL is behind the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute, the Freshman Year for Free initiative of Modern States, and many other major digital learning initiatives. They also previously worked with me to develop Open edX extensions to create courses based on Jupyter notebooks.

JupyterCon Online will be much more than a conference. We conceived a long-term strategy with the key vision of magnifying career-advancement opportunities for all members of our community, and assembling a permanent library of learning resources.

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

JupyterCon Online will be held October 5–17, 2020.

NOW OPEN: Call for Proposals

JupyterCon Online is brought to you by Project Jupyter and NumFOCUS, with additional sponsors.

Want to sponsor JupyterCon? Email us at jupytercon-sponsor@numfocus.org to receive a prospectus.

JupyterCon 2020 is a go!

2020-02-07T21:19:00+00:00

JupyterCon 2020 will be brought to you by Project Jupyter and NumFOCUS. Photo: O’Reilly Media CC BY-NC.

UPDATE: Please read the announcement (June 29, 2020) on JupyterCon Online: “JupyterCon: more than a conference.”

Just over a year ago, Project Jupyter announced it was reevaluating its annual community conference. An advisory committee of volunteers recommended a JupyterCon 2020 emphasizing a focus on access and leadership. We are now thrilled to announce a global Jupyter conference:

JupyterCon 2020 will be held August 10–14 in the historic city of Berlin, Germany.

The call for proposals (tutorials, talks, sprints) will open soon. In the meantime, we invite you to sign up as a proposal reviewer now.

Interested in sponsoring JupyterCon? Email us at jupytercon-sponsor@numfocus.org to receive a prospectus.

What is JupyterCon? Why do we do this?

Open-source software projects are fueled by the labor of many people — most of them volunteers — who often interact only online for years. It’s amazing the value we create together, coordinating our work in a distributed fashion. Even if we spend most of our time interacting through digital mediums, we see their limits and come in person to overcome them. In the community conference, we confirm in-person our virtual social links and our common ethical and professional aims.

In JupyterCon, we celebrate the distributed nature of our community, face-to-face. We enhance the year-long remote collaborations with in-person interactions for just a few days. This helps sustain a community, building and strengthening relationships among Jupyter aficionados and developers, newbies and veterans. JupyerCon inspires keen appreciation for the collective labor that creates high-quality technology for anyone in the world to use freely.

We come together to share, hack, eat, play, bond, and imbue with meaning our work, whether paid or volunteer. JupyterCon is a place where we feel free to express our intellectual aspirations, doubts, and pleasures. For the conference to unify us and develop our group solidarity, we welcome and include everyone. JupyterCon 2020 makes a strong public commitment to diversity and inclusion, with a rich program of actions to support it.

Message from the JupyterCon Diversity Chair:

I’m excited to join the JupyterCon 2020 leadership as Diversity Chair. My goals are two-fold: to drive the conference’s diversity and inclusion actions; and to move the needle on long-term diversity achievement so this position is redundant in the future. An inclusive environment at JupyterCon is a common resource. It is like air and water. By using Jupyter, within its extensive ecosystem, we are all participants and contributors and have the potential to positively impact our environment, both within the conference and the greater community.

I invite you to share any thoughts, concerns, or suggestions related to diversity by writing to jupytercon-diversity@numfocus.org.

— Reshama Shaikh, Diversity Chair

The JupyterCon program—with tutorials, talks, social events, and more—will be full of opportunities for participants to share knowledge with each other and to gain professional skills. Save the date and look out for coming announcements!

We want to thank the fabulous team of volunteers that is planning JupyterCon (listed below), as well as the many community members who participated on the JupyterCon advisory committee last year (co-chaired by Safia Abdalla, Paige Bailey, and Doug Blank), and the Jupyter Events working group (Lorena Barba, Sylvain Corlay, Brian Granger, Jason Grout, Ana Ruvalcaba).

Stay tuned for more details coming soon!

— Lorena A Barba, JupyterCon 2020 General Chair

JupyterCon 2020 Venue and dates

Berlin Conference Center, 10–13 August 2020
(sprints on Aug. 14, venue to be announced)

JupyterCon 2020 Committee

Lorena A. Barba, General Chair
Sylvain Corlay, Vice Chair
Jason Grout, Technical Program Chair
Reshama Shaikh, Diversity Chair
Paco Nathan, Sponsorships Chair
Rosie Pongracz, Finance Chair
Paige Bailey, Communications/Marketing Chair
Joshua Patterson, Exhibits Chair
Tania Allard and Gerard Gorman, Tutorials Chair
Safia Abdalla and Kirstie Whitaker, Sprints Co-Chairs
Jeremy Tuloup, Local Organizing Committee Chair
Wolf Vollprecht, Local Sponsorships Liaison
Laura Norén, Eco-friendly Event Chair
Amanda Casari, Speaker Management
Jim Weiss (NumFOCUS), Logistics Chair
Carol Willing, Special Advisor to the General Chair

JupyterCon 2020 is an event brought to you in partnership by Project Jupyter and NumFOCUS.

Teaching and Learning with Jupyter

2019-01-07T12:57:00+00:00

The book-sprint participants on day 1, developing the content ideas for our open book. Credit: Richard West.

From the early days — even before the Jupyter name — many of us foresaw that the IPython Notebook and the ecosystem of tools growing around it would be a “killer app” for education. But how could we imagine that Jupyter would be at the epicenter of the data science shake-up of tech jobs, reskilling, and educational innovation?

#scipy2014 keynote @LorenaABarba says “IPython Notebooks are the Killer App for teaching (science and engineering).”

— katy huff (@katyhuff), July 8, 2014

Today, Jupyter is the technology behind the most innovative educational programs in data science, and is platform-of-choice for tutorials, workshops, online lessons, and even books. So I decided it’s a good time to collect the knowledge and experience of early adopters of Jupyter for teaching, combine it with reflections of scholars of education, and write an open book: a Handbook for Teaching and Learning with Jupyter.

On Nov. 28–29, 2018, I welcomed fifteen researchers, educators and STEM faculty at the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., for a book sprint — in two and a half days, we collaboratively wrote the first draft of this handbook, and immediately published it online at jupyter4edu.github.io. The open book continues to be edited and added to via an open-development model on GitHub, with dozens of pull requests merged in its first month.

Ready to start writing today, post-it notes everywhere #Jupyter4Edu

— Lorena Barba @labarba@fosstodon.org (@LorenaABarba), November 29, 2018

The book covers the following topics:

Why we use Jupyter notebooks for teaching, the learning benefits and some anecdotes from our own experiences
What we do with Jupyter, with lots of examples and tips for incorporating notebooks into a lesson or course
A catalogue of pedagogical patterns with notebooks, drawn from our own experience and examples from others
The Jupyter Notebook ecosystem, focusing on the tools that are most useful for teaching and learning
Getting your class going with Jupyter: all you need to know about options for installing software, infrastructure options, distributing and collecting materials, assessing student work, and more
Usage case studies, including large-scale adoption, single courses, and notable teaching materials published as notebooks

Book link: jupyter4edu.github.io

Jupyter continues to grow in popularity for teaching data science and computation not only in STEM fields, but also data journalism, business and quantitative economics, data-based decision sciences and policy, quantitative health sciences, and digital humanities.

For educators newly adopting Jupyter, navigating the ecosystem of tools and content can be overwhelming. They could study many examples, and consume myriad blog posts and talk videos to distill the patterns of good practices and technical solutions to best serve their students. Our open book aims to be the entry point for educators who want to use Jupyter to empower their teaching. We hope it will grow to encompass all you need to know about Jupyter in teaching and learning.

The book sprint was supported by a grant from Bloomberg to Project Jupyter for holding Jupyter Community Workshops last year, which provided funding for the participants’ travel and event catering. The grant was managed by NumFOCUS (fiscal sponsor for Project Jupyter). Meeting space was provided free of charge by the George Washington University, and the group was fêted at a reception sponsored by Leidos.

Tweet with #jupyter4edu to let us know what you think!

Book-sprint participants, with their bios, at: https://osf.io/uqz4j/wiki/Participants/

Book link: jupyter4edu.github.io

Synopsis: JupyterCon 2018 Education Track

2018-08-22T01:02:00+00:00

Barba keynoting at JupyterCon 2017. Credit: O’Reilly Media.

I’m on the train to NY, giddy in anticipation of the Jupyter community celebrating together for the second year. It was a privilege for me to be invited to keynote last year, at the inaugural JupyterCon. This year, I am part of the Program Committee, co-chairing the education track with Robert Talbert. Let me tell you about the impressive and inspiring conference line-up for Jupyter in education!

The main conference lists 11 talks on the education track, listed below. In addition to these, we have a panel (2:40–3:20pm Thursday), and an unconference-style session on Thursday at 5 PM.

The panel is titled “The Future of Jupyter in Education,” and features the following panelists:

Carol Willing, @WillingCarol
Natalia Clementi, @ncclementi
James Colliander, @colliand
Allen Downey, @allendowney
Jason Moore, @moorepants
Danny Caballero, @physicistdanny

Each panelist will make a 2–3 min statement to get people thinking, and then it’s Q&A with the audience. We’ve asked the panelists to jot down some ideas to share with us, based on the following questions:

What do you see in the future of Jupyter if it is to fulfill its potential for teaching and learning?

What do you want from Jupyter as its adoption in education grows?

If you are interested in the future of Jupyter in education, please come join the conversation at the panel — it will be energizing!

One thing we don’t want for the discussion in this panel is to drift towards the DevOps challenges of adopting the tools (like JupyterHub and nbgrader). The Project Jupyter team is very aware that DevOps is a pain point for the educational uses of Jupyter. And they are working on it!

Let’s put our minds together to build a vision for the ecosystem, imagine how institutions might collaborate (e.g., federated solution in Canada), what could be the role of the private sector (i.e., paid options, freemium models), or the nonprofit sector (e.g., NumFOCUS) — but refrain from going into the weeds of concrete technical details (on this occasion).

We want to steer the conversation towards the learning concerns more than the edtech concerns. For example, now that many educators are using Jupyter, can we look into what works, and are we using research-based pedagogical strategies? What are these (e.g., chunking, scaffolding), and can we distill some “best practices”?

For the unconference-style session, the slate is clean. We’ll bring sharpies and big post-it notes, and be ready to live tweet!

Thursday: 5 sessions

11:05am–11:45am
Flipped learning with Jupyter: Experiences, best practices, and supporting research, Beekman/Sutton North | Lorena Barba (George Washington University), Robert Talbert (Grand Valley State University)

11:55am–12:35pm
JupyterHub for domain-focused integrated learning modules, Beekman/Sutton North | Mariah Rogers (UC Berkeley Division of Data Sciences), Ronald Walker (UC Berkeley Division of Data Sciences), Julian Kudszus (Yelp)

1:50pm–2:30pm
Jupyter for every high schooler, Beekman/Sutton North | Rob Newton (Trinity School)

2:40pm–3:20pm
Real-time collaboration with Jupyter notebooks using CoCalc, Murray Hill | William Stein (SageMath, Inc. | University of Washington)

4:10pm–4:50pm
Learn by doing: Using data-driven stories and visualizations in the (high school and college) classroom, Beekman/Sutton North | Carol Willing (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Jessica Forde (Jupyter), Erik Sundell (IT-Gymnasiet Uppsala)

Friday: 6 sessions

11:05am–11:45am
Data science in US and Canadian higher education, Beekman/Sutton North | Laura Noren (NYU Center for Data Science)

11:55am–12:35pm
I don’t like notebooks, Nassau | Joel Grus (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence)

11:55am–12:35pm
The Jupyter Notebook as a transparent way to document machine learning model development: A case study from a US defense agency, Concourse A: Business Summit | Catherine Ordun (Booz Allen Hamilton)

1:50pm–2:30pm
Jupyter graduates, Beekman/Sutton North | Douglas Blank (Bryn Mawr College), Nicole Petrozzo (Bryn Mawr College)

2:40pm–3:20pm
Reproducible education: What teaching can learn from open science practices, Beekman/Sutton North | Elizabeth Wickes (School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

5:00pm–5:40pm
Current RISE candies and its evolution into the future, Beekman/Sutton North | Damián Avila (Anaconda, Inc.)

If I missed an education-track session in my synopsis, let me know and I’ll add it!