About the series
Open source, academic science and the public mission of research: reflections from the field
Speaker: Professor Fernando Perez from the University of California Berkeley
Abstract: The future of science should be open, reproducible, inclusive and community-driven. In this talk, I’ll explore the challenges this position presents from the perspective of someone who has spent almost 20 years building open source software and communities. I have lived (often precariously) a dual life of “real academic” and of open source developer and advocate, working on IPython, Project Jupyter and the Scientific Python ecosystem since 2001.
I will provide an overview of Project Jupyter, including its intellectual backbone, the open source community context that surrounds it, and some of the impact it has had in recent years. This will help frame the second part of the talk, what I hope will be an invitation to a discussion on how the opening sentence above can be realized, with the support of agencies like the NSF. The scientific, technical and community dynamics of projects like Jupyter presents interesting challenges in the context of traditional scientific incentives (funding, publishing, hiring and promotion, etc.) I’ll briefly outline some of these but will mostly focus on some ideas that I hope can move the conversation forward in productive ways.
Bio: Fernando Pérez is an associate professor in Statistics at UC Berkeley and a Faculty Scientist in the Department of Data Science and Technology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After completing a PhD in particle physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, his postdoctoral research in applied mathematics centered on the development of fast algorithms for the solution of partial differential equations. Today, his research focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, interactive and literate computing, and reproducible research. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and co-founded its successor, Project Jupyter. The Jupyter team collaborates openly to create the next generation of tools for human-driven computational exploration, data analysis, scientific insight and education.
He is a National Academy of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow and a Senior Fellow and founding co-investigator of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is a co-founder of the NumFOCUS Foundation, and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He is a recipient of the 2012 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, and of the 2017 ACM Software System Award.
To Join the webinar, please register at: http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/nsf/190815/
