In one of today's lightning talks, Chris Holdgraf (Berkeley) showed us JupyterHub and related projects, which are methods for distributing data, software, and compute to students (or members of a group) so they can transparently use a non-trivial data-science environment, through any kind of client. It is beautiful stuff, but also very interesting in its origins: It grows out of the undergraduate class Data 8 at Berkeley, which is an innovative project to teach the fundamentals of data science to all Berkeley undergrads, independent of their backgrounds. And much later, over drinks, Holdgraf explained to me lots of chaos-monkey-ish and sensible things they do at Berkeley to make sure that their code is truly and absolutely platform-neutral and vendor-independent. The intellectual content of these projects is truly impressive.
In the afternoon, I got some quality time in with Sarah Stone (UW) on our commitments to produce final products for this project around spaces. We discussed the role of ethnography, architects, and data scientists in figuring out what is and isn't working in our spaces. We also discussed what kinds of products we want to produce.
The last event of the day included a great plenary by Huppenkothen (UW) about the AstroHackWeek and related projects. She emphasized its interdisciplinarity, its values of experimentation, and above all, its commitment to broadening the fields of study and being welcoming to all. It was inspiring and enjoyable. I am extremely proud to have been a part of these projects.
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