[Baypiggies] iPython 4.0

[Michael Pittaro]

+1 - A major achievement.

The SFBay ACM has an upcoming talk on interesting applications of
Notebooks for collaborative science.  This one could be really
interesting.

The blurb is below.

mike


http://www.sfbayacm.org/event/2015-08-24

Project Jupiter https://jupyter.org/ evolved from IPython notebooks,
and now supports a wide variety of programming language back-ends.
Notebooks have proven to be effective tools used in Data Science,
providing convenient packages for what Don Knuth coined as "literate
programming" in the 1980s: code plus exposition in markdown. Results
of running the code appear in-line as interactive graphics -- all
packaged as collaborative, web-based documents. Some have said that
the introduction of cloud-based notebooks is nearly as large of a
fundamental change in software practice as the introduction of
spreadsheets.

O'Reilly Media has been considering the question, "What comes after
books and video?" Or, as one might imagine more pointedly, what comes
after Kindle? To that point we have collaborated with Project Jupyter
to integrate notebooks into our content management process, allowing
authors to generate articles, tutorials, reports, and other media
products as notebooks that also incorporate video segments. Code
dependencies are containerized using Docker, and all of the content
gets managed in Git repositories. We have added another layer, an open
source project called Thebe that provides a kind of "media player" for
embedding the containerized notebooks into web pages.

Some examples include:

https://beta.oreilly.com/learning

https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly

http://notebooks.codeneuro.org/


An early POC, working with Nature magazine, showed how peer-reviewed
scientific articles could be provided such that readers could interact
with the code+data:

http://www.nature.com/news/interactive-notebooks-sharing-the-code-1.16261

-
The overall goal is to support repeatable science -- or perhaps one as
might say "open science". The tools of Computer Science and Software
Engineering are being leveraged to create this. Data Science provided
the initial examples; however, now this tooling is being adopted
rapidly by genomics and other areas of life science. Overall at
O'Reilly Media, we see these frameworks working together as first
steps toward a retooling of learning platforms in general.


Experiences teaching with MOOC platforms such as edX have shown that
instrumentation and analysis can be bottlenecks for effective
pedagogy. Meanwhile, programs at Cal Tech and other institutions have
been advancing notions of "inverted classrooms" as an alternative way
to leverage online platforms. The use of cloud-based containerized
notebooks allows for much better instrumentation and measurement of
student interactions, to help model pedagogical aspects of this work.
This talk will also consider how and where Data Science practices can
benefit Education through an evolution of software platforms.