Re: Sage Days 25, India: Event Planning

[Madhusudan C.S]

Hi William and others,


As Prabhu sir said sorry for the delay in posting back
the schedule. We prepared a very rough draft of the
schedule upon which we can discuss and arrive at the
final one here. I am posting the tentative schedule here
along with few comments.

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 11:43 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I've removed Amod Agashe from the cc list, since he definitely won't
be able to come back to India this summer (I just talked with him
about this in Montreal this week).  I've added Sourav Sen Gupta (who
lives in India), who might be able to come (??).

2010/3/23 Anoop Jacob Thomas <an...@fossee.in>:

> Hello,
>
> I am Anoop Jacob Thomas from FOSSEE Team, IIT Bombay. I am sorry I couldn't contact you for a long time, we were working to get the venue ready.
>
> We went through the page on how to plan future Sage Days [http://wiki.sagemath.org/HowToHostASageDays]. We would like to suggest few changes in the events:
>
> 1. Starting the events at 10 or 11am on all days would be better for the Indian community, because we cannot extend the events late in the night.

No problem.  The only reason we like to start late is because the
event goes late.
How about if we plan to start with some refreshments at 9:30 and the
first talks/tutorials/whatever at 10am.

> 2. Include tutorial sessions on all days/few days.

That makes sense, given the audience I imagine (having talked with Prabhu).

> We would also need some help from you for finalizing the events for each day. We suggest that each day be theme based, and the sprint for that day also be theme based. But we are not sure on how to classify them.
>
> Each day is proposed to contain these events. From August 9-12, total of 4days.
>
>     * Talk (2 or 3 sessions) [from 11am to 1pm]
>     * Tutorial based on Themes [2pm - 4pm]
>     * Sprints [After tutorials]
>
> It will be great if you could give a reference on how to design the tutorial.

Until how late would the sprints go?  7pm?

What about a schedule like this:

 9:30-10:00 refreshments
 10:00-11:00 talk 1
 11:00-12:00 talk 2
  2:00-3:00  tutorial 1
  3:00-4:00  tutorial 2
  4:00-7:00 coding sprint

We have maintained the same schedule structure as per your suggestion:

Tentative Schedule
Day 1 - Monday 9th August, 2010
   09:30 - 10:00  Refreshments
   10:00 - 11:00  Introduction to Sage: What can Sage do for you? and 
                  Introduction to Sage Notebook                           - Talk
   11:00 - 12:00  Basic Algebra, Calculus, Numerics, Arbitrary Precision
                  Numerics                                                - Talk(s)
   12:00 - 14:00  Lunch + Rest time
   14:00 - 15:00  Basic Plotting, Number Theory, Polynomials              - Talk(s)
   15:00 - 16:00  Sage as a replacement for Matlab for numerics           - Talk
   16:00 - 16:20  Tea Break
   16:20 - 19:00  Sprints

Day 2 - Tuesday 10th August, 2010
   09:30 - 10:00   Refreshments
   10:00 - 11:00   How to set-up Sage server?                             - Talk
   11:00 - 12:00   Cython                                                 - (Not sure if it must be a tutorial/talk)
   12:00 - 14:00   Lunch + Rest time
   14:00 - 15:00   Combinatorics                                          - Tutorial (Symmetric functions and other topics of interest: Krishnan sir can be contacted)
   15:00 - 16:00   Graphics and visualization                             - Tutorial
   16:00 - 16:20   Tea Break
   16:20 - 19:00   Sprints

Day 3 - Wednesday 11th August, 2010
   09:30 - 10:00   Refreshments
   10:00 - 11:00   Contributing to Sage                                   - Talk
   11:00 - 12:00   Numbers                                                    - Talk(s)
   12:00 - 14:00   Lunch + Rest time
   14:00 - 15:00   Numbers continued                                      - Tutorial
   15:00 - 16:00   Numbers continued                                      - Tutorial
   16:00 - 16:20   Tea Break
   16:20 - 19:00   Sprints

Day 4 - Thursday 12th August, 2010
   09:30 - 10:00   Refreshments
   10:00 - 11:00   Number Theory                                          - Talk(s)
   11:00 - 12:00   Number Theory continued                                - Tutorial
   12:00 - 14:00   Lunch + Rest time
   14:00 - 15:00   Cryptography                                           - Talk(s)
   15:00 - 16:00   Cryptography continued                                 - Tutorial
   16:00 - 16:20   Tea Break
   16:20 - 19:00   Sprints

This is the overall plan we are suggesting. The kind of audience here
for Sage Days from what we heard from a professor in Math
department and our experiences are mostly noobish. They are not
even much aware of what can be done in Sage. Some of them may
have not even be aware of Sage. But if Sage can do what they are
doing they will be willing to use it. So we are planning to have more
of tutorials sessions.

First has too much talks. I think this must be changed. I request
comments and opinion on this. Also these are the suggestions
given by Prof. S.Krishnan in Math Dept., IIT Bombay who works
on combinatorics and uses Sage a bit:

"""East Side, West Side notes by Herbert S Wilf from University of
Pennsylvania uses Maple. It has much interests in IITB. Maple is
very expensive. So it will be good if Sage can do something
similar to Maple. Krishnan sir suggested it will also be good to
include a session on Sage as a replacement for Maple.

Singular is used to Algebra here in IITB. Singular introduction to
Algebra is a book on Singular. If Sage can do the same, a small
talk on Sage for Singular users will be really helpful.

PORTA is a package used for polyhedra. If that can be done by
Sage too, please try to include a very small talk on it.

For Linear programming QSOpt is used in Math dept of IITB.
Something on it if Sage can do will be really helpful."""

Upon this we haven't planned anything for Sprints yet. I think
we need to start doing it now. Can you all please suggest ideas
for sprint?

On at least 1 or 2 days, the talk could be a series of 5 minute
"lightning talks".  These are often interesting and fun, and provide a
nice format for people to present something that they are interested
in.

Having the coding sprint right after the tutorials gives us a buffer,
in case a tutorial accidentally runs more than an hour.

We need to come up with four topics.  Here are some that come to my
mind to choose from:

  * Number theory  (India has a very rich tradition in number theory,
and Sage is damned good at number theory)

  * Graphics and visualization: matplotlib, sage's mathematica like
plotting, 3d graphics in sage

  * The Sage Notebook (could easily be a whole day, ranging from how
to use it, how to develop on it, how to setup your own servers, etc.)

 * Graph theory (i.e., networks with vertices and edges; networkx;
sage's large amount of graph theory that goes beyond networkx quite a
bit)

Also in the above schedule we have left Graph Theory even though
it is crowd puller for the fact that there is not enough time for it.
Can some one suggest if it can fit in somewhere instead of the
topic in the schedule now?

 * Cython (general intro; how to use in sage; optimization
techniques; how to use numpy, GSL, MPIR, etc. from Cython)

  * Combinatorics (that massive amount of sage-comabinat stuff)

  * Numbers (a whole day about the various types of rings and fields
in Sage -- float's, int's, Sage's MPIR-based integers, rationals,
complex, intervals, mpmath)

  * Symbolic calculus (Sage's C++-based "pynac" symbolics; Sympy; MPmath).

--
Thanks and regards,
 Madhusudan.C.S

Blogs at: www.madhusudancs.info
My Online Identity: madhusudancs