Michael Tiemann (Red Hat) visit to Dunedin

[Andrew Geddis]

Kia ora koutou,

Apologies for dropping suddenly into the group chat, but Chanel O'Brien from Enterprise Dunedin suggested I try and connect with you. I'm a Professor at the Otago Law Faculty, and through a "friend of a friend" chain of connections I've become prospective Dunedin host to Michael Tiemann, the Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. I note at the outset that I am not a computer guy in any way, shape or form, but I believe this is a fairly important company in the industry and he seems to have done some innovative and important work in the coding field.

 

Anyway, he is going to be here in Dunedin on October 22 + 23 and is keen to meet with like-minded people to talk about issues in the coding field. Here's what he proposed when I floated the idea of linking him with folks while he's here in Dunedin:

"I could also aim at much more technical subjects, such as how I added a model for simulating the effects of the COVID pandemic in an integrated assessment model (IAM) for evaluating global economic welfare in a variety of climate scenarios.  IAMs (Nordhaus and the DICE system) shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018.  The open source WITNESS IAM we’ve been working on has new maths developed almost 10 years after DICE that give it orders of magnitude more resolution and optimum-finding abilities.  The other share when to Paul Romer, who has become quite the open source software advocate: https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-of-the-research-paper/ .  That blog posting contains this banger of a quote:

 

I’m frightened by the Vandals

 

In the larger contest between open and proprietary models, Mathematica versus Jupyter would be a draw if the only concern were their technical accomplishments. In the 1990s, Mathematica opened up an undeniable lead. Now, Jupyter is the unambiguous technical leader.

 

The tie-breaker is social, not technical. The more I learn about the open source community, the more I trust its members. The more I learn about proprietary software, the more I worry that objective truth might perish from the earth.

 

I can talk about how open source—then and now—has been the ballast keeping tech afloat as too many go overboard thinking AI will solve all our problems.

 

Perhaps these are better dinner conversations that classroom conversations.  I’m happy to engage in either context, or both!"

If any of this (or, anything else he might bring to the table) is of interest to CodeCraft or other groups you might think of in town, I'd be very happy to connect you with him - like I say, it's not my area at all but I'm very happy to facilitate those who are interested in this area. You can get me at andrew.ged...@otago.ac.nz.

Thanks and sorry again to jump into the messages,

Noho ora mai ra,

Andrew