Peter Steinbach on The Carpentries

Incubator Lesson Spotlight: Introduction to Deep Learning

Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Incubator Lesson Spotlight highlights a lesson under development by our community in The Carpentries Incubator. In this edition, we look at the progress being made on the {{page.lesson_title}} lesson, and hear from the authors about how The Carpentries community can get involved with the ongoing development of this lesson.

Lesson Profile

Title: {{page.lesson_title}}
Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/deep-learning-intro
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/deep-learning-intro

Learning Objectives

Prepare input data for use for deep learning
Design and train a Deep Neural Network
Troubleshoot the learning process
Measure the performance of the network
Visualize data and results

Target Audience

The main audience of this lesson is considered to have an academic background at any level. More importantly, we expect them to know basics of statistics and machine learning to follow through with the material.

HPC in a day?

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Preface

In today’s scientific landscape, computational methods or efficient use thereof can be at the heart of the race for new insights, if not at the heart of the race with the academic competition. Learning how to automate tasks from data analysis to data preprocessing as taught by the carpentries provides the technical concepts to enter this race with an advantage.

If you just graduated a software/data carpentry boot camp and want to go beyond your laptop’s capabilities, the next step in academia is typically to approached the data center of your university or alike. There, a user account application has to be filed for the High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. After some more formalities, storage and computing time is awarded and you can successfully log into the cluster. And then? Then either our carpenter is given a link to the wiki of the local cluster and how to use it. Sometimes there can be a short course on the mechanics of the HPC cluster and how to use tools that are installed on the cluster. That’s it and good luck.

Pulling In Those Left Behind

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A common challenge that arises before or during a workshop is that participants' prior expertise in programming or broadly speaking their abilities of using computers for science is distributed randomly. At best, this distribution peaks at the expectations of the instructor. Usually, this distribution is quite wide and thus a considerable portion of the participants do lack the necessary predispositions for the workshop level, or have a slower learning rate or simply are too shy to ask questions. I recently taught a follow-up workshop to the Software Carpentry (SWC) Novice material and struggled to keep the pace of teaching at a level so all learners would come along. Given the feedback on the SWC mailing list (see the original post), this problem occurs quite often. Thus, this blog post is a summary of the discussion initiated among fellow SWC instructors on how to pull in those learners again that fall behind or how to pace/design a course so that a minimal portion of learners fall behind.

Particle Physicists Pulling Themselves From The Swamp

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

What does it mean to work on a modern particle physics experiment like ATLAS (wikipedia, public) or CMS (wikipedia, public) at the Large Hadron Collider in the 21st century? It's fun, it's collaborating with great and interesting people, it's challenging, it's making you enjoy finding things out, it's what I always wanted to do. Also: it is painful, discouraging, and tends to suck the life out of a young mind. Confused? Let's rewind...