[IPython-dev] New Data Science Initiative, aka where has Fernando been hiding for the last year?

[Bartosz]

Thanks for the explanations and encouragement. Indeed, I hope that your 
project will open many doors  for computation science. So I keep my 
fingers crossed.

I enjoyed your blog post a lot. I definitely agree that there is need 
to explore the frontiers of "data science". There is much talk about it, 
but I wonder how much it really differs from the data analysis most 
scientist do. Right now I would consider it a methodology rather than 
science on its own.

 From your post I learnt about the general ideas and you did an awesome 
job in explaining them. I mailed to ask  about specific activities 
planned in the project and institute (schools, online courses, software 
development, etc.), your reply clarified them all. Thanks!

I will stay tuned.

Yours,

Bartosz

> On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Bartosz <mail at telenczuk.pl> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Fernando,
>> That's great news! Congratulations!
> Thanks! Crazy amount of work that was done in relatively high secrecy
> (which runs against my instincts, though in this case there were good
> reasons for it), so it's very nice to be able to talk about it
> publicly.
>  
> 
>> We have been organising a school on Python in (data) science (last 
>> time
>> in Zurich: http://python.g-node.org [1]). The school has been a great
>> success, but obtaining funding for a general school without any 
>> specific
>> field (like bioinformatic, neuroscience etc.) is rather difficult in 
>> Europe.
> And you think it's easy here? ;)  This kind of stuff is *super hard*
> to get funded anywhere, and it's been our struggle for over a decade.
>  That's why we're so excited about this initiative: we hope that this
> support from the Moore and Sloan foundations will signal to the (much,
> much bigger) federal funding agencies, and the ones elsewhere in the
> world, that this stuff actually matters.
> BTW, you guys are doing a terrific job with the G-Node school, I know
> our own Stefan vdW is a regular and he speaks very highly of the
> event.  Keep up the good work.
> Part of the reason for such a high-visibility, coordinated media
> blitz (White House, NSF, NYTimes, HuffPost, all universities, all
> foundations, blog posts, etc) was precisely to give ammunition to
> everyone who is fighting these battles with their committees, program
> directors, colleagues, etc.  Hopefully next time that someone tells
> you this isn't important, you can point them to this collection that
> has all the links about this in one place:
> http://bitly.com/bundles/fperezorg/1 [2]
> and it will make it easier to argue your case :)
>  
> 
>> 39;t want to sound rude, but was there something in my blog post that 
>> wasn't quite clear about the broader picture
> py to answer questions, but I'd like that post, in addition to the
> Berkeley press release (http://bit.ly/HYrhNT [3]), to be a clear
> outline of the big ideas, so I'd rather fix that than answer only on a
> mailing list.
> As for the role for Python/IPython, right now I don't have much more
> to say than what was in my email: there's a *lot* of Python activity
> at Berkeley right now (see  http://python.berkeley.edu [4]), and
> multiple projects use it. Everyone in the IPython team is spending
> some time engaging the broader campus community, lecturing in courses,
> meeting students, etc. So we're spreading our engagement to campus
> quite a bit. What we hope is that when the institute ramps up, it will
> be a home for a lot of this activity; we may physically move our work
> space there (at least part-time), and I hope we'll be able to hire
> more folks from the open source Python world (and related spaces, like
> Julia) to make Berkeley an even more significant center of open source
> scientific computing.
> Does this help? 
> Cheers,
> f
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://python.g-node.org
> [2] http://bitly.com/bundles/fperezorg/1
> [3] http://bit.ly/HYrhNT
> [4] http://python.berkeley.edu/
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