Scientists spend more and more time writing, maintaining, and debugging software. While techniques for doing this efficiently have evolved,only few scientists actually use them. As a result, instead of doing their research, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel. In this course we will present a selection of advanced programming techniques, incorporating theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of a programming scientist. New skills will be tested in a real programming project: we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game. We use the Python programming language for the entire course. Python works as a simple programming language for beginners, but more importantly, it also works great in scientific simulations and data analysis. We show how clean language design, ease of extensibility, and the great wealth of open source libraries for scientific computing and data visualization are driving Python to become a standard tool for the programming scientist. This school is targeted at Master or PhD students and Post-docs from all areas of science. Competence in Python or in another language such as Java, C/C++, MATLAB, or Mathematica is absolutely required. Basic knowledge of Python is assumed. Participants without any prior experience with Python should work through the proposed introductory materials before the course.

Faculty

Francesc Alted, Continuum Analytics Inc., USA

Pietro Berkes, Enthought Inc., UK

Valentin Haenel, freelance developer and consultant, Berlin, Germany

Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, USA

Eilif Muller, Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Emanuele Olivetti, NeuroInformatics Laboratory, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and University of Trento, Italy

Rike-Benjamin Schuppner, Technologit GbR, Germany

Bartosz Teleńczuk, Unité de Neurosciences Information et Complexité, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France

Stéfan van der Walt, Applied Mathematics, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Bastian Venthur, Berlin Institute of Technology and Bernstein Focus Neurotechnology, Germany

Niko Wilbert, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, Germany

Tiziano Zito, Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany