Last year I had the privilage to attend JupyterCon 2020 that was held virtually, thanks to Covid-19. Given, the mental toll the pandemic enforced upon the global population, it was actually a pleasure to attend the conference virtually and listen to the talks from the industry experts. All the talks are openly available to the public through the conference's YouTube channel. I would still go back and listen to these talks that are relevant to my research and interests. For a moment, I even thought of submitting a lightning talk but then I backed off due to some problems that I faced with our wifi connection. Some of the talks that I find very interesting are:
  1. The keynote talk Next-generation frameworks for Large-scale AI by Dr. Anima Anandkumar, who is a Bren professor at Caltech and also the director of machine learning research at NVIDIA. I would say, she is one of the best researchers of present time in machine learning, and I always find her research very inspiring.
  2. Next, the talk Tackling Toxic Culture in Tech Racism and Its Legacy by Dr. Tema Okun from Duke University, who has spent 30 years of her life working on racial justice and equity. I would recomment the talk to anyone who wants to learn more on diversity, racism, equity and community building. She is also the author of the award wining book The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don't Want to Know, and this must be in everyone's reading list interested on the topic. It surely is in mine.
  3. Recently, I have been much fascinated to learn about social network analysis, more specifically biological networks. The talk Automating biological network visualization with Jupyter Notebook by Kozo Nishida from the Quantitative Biology Center (QBiC), RIKEN. This talk has inspired me to delve more into bilogical network visualization and data visualization in general. Just fantastic!
  4. I have used Fortran during my undergraduate and master studies in Physics and I would say, whatever text editors or compilers I used to run the code, did not help at all. It was too difficult to manage. But the talk LFortran on the modern open-source Fortran compiler LFortran, which enables the interactive execution of code in Jupyter, by Dr. Ondřej Čertík et al. was eye opening to me. Dr. Čertík is also the original author of SymPy and SymEngine, besides LFortran. Presently, he is a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA.
I have learned a lot from the conference, and I will surely try to visit the in-person conference once that is permitted.