PLOTCON 2016: Fernando Perez, The architecture of Jupyter

Project Jupyter, evolved from the IPython environment, provides a platform for interactive computing that is widely used today in research, education, journalism and industry. The core premise of the Jupyter architecture is to design tools around the experience of interactive computing, building an environment, protocol, file format and libraries optimized for the computational process when there is a human in the loop, in a live iteration with ideas and data assisted by the computer. In this talk, I will discuss what are the basic ideas that underpin Jupyter, and how they provide "lego blocks" that enable the project team, and the broader community, to develop a variety of tools and approaches to problems in interactive computing, data science, visualization and more. Fernando Pérez (@fperez_org) is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and and a founding investigator of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, created in 2013. He received a PhD in particle physics, followed by postdoctoral research in applied mathematics, developing numerical algorithms. Today, his research focuses on creating tools for modern computational research and data science across domain disciplines, with an emphasis on high-level languages, literate computing and reproducible research. He created IPython while a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead its evolution into Project Jupyter, now as a collaborative effort with a talented team that does all the hard work. He regularly lectures about scientific computing and data science, and is a member of the Python Software Foundation as well as a founding member of the Numfocus Foundation. He is the recipient of the 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software from the Free Software Foundation.