Once again, there will be another round of the Summer School “Advanced
Scientific Programming in Python”. This year in St. Andrews, UK.
Quoting from the official
announcement:
Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and
debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have
evolved, only few scientists actually 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, incorporating
theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of
a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real
programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining
scientific 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 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 is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with
Python should work through the proposed introductory
materials before the course.
You can apply on-line at http://python.g-node.org
Applications must be submitted before May 29, 2011. Notifications of
acceptance will be sent by June 19, 2011.
No fee is charged but participants should take care of travel, living,
and accommodation expenses. Candidates will be selected on the basis of
their profile. Places are limited: acceptance rate in past editions was
around 30%. Prerequisites: You are supposed to know the basics of Python
to participate in the lectures. Please consult the website for a list of
introductory material.
If your’re a scientist and interested in Python, I cannot recommend this
summer school highly enough. The Summer School is always fun, the
faculty members are very nice and always willing to help and answer
questions. The balance between lectures and exercises is in my opinion
very good, and you’ll learn a lot about Python during the week. The
highlight of every Python School is always the Pac Man tournament, where
groups of students will implement their own Pac Man agent (in Python)
and compete against the other agents in a tournament ‘till the bitter end!
The students of the previous editions were usually very happy during and
after the School. Speaking of happiness, since no fee is charged for the
Summer School, you’ll have more money left over to invest into the
excellent Scottish pubs!