Interviews on The Carpentries

Interview about Software Carpentry (and Education)

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Chris Gammell and Jeff Shelton interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for their Engineering Commons podcast series. The interview turned out to mostly be about education, online and otherwise—I hope readers will find it interesting.

Interview with Cameron Neylon

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Cameron Neylon, a noted advocate of open science.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

I work for the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. We are a research funder but although we provide some direct funding our main role is to build and run or subscribe to large scale research infrastructure on behalf of UK scientists. For instance we run telescopes, pay the UK subscription to CERN, as well as supporting and running synchrotrons, neutron sources, high powered lasers, microfabrication facilities and large scale computing infrastructure.

Interview with Sergey Fomel

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Sergey Fomel is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the leader of the Madagascar project.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

I work at the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment between the Bureau of Economic Geology and the Department of Geological Sciences. My group conducts research on computational geophysics, with applications to petroleum exploration.

Interview with Davor Cubranic

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Dr. Davor Cubranic, a statistician who lives and works in Vancouver, B.C. Davor recently ran a workshop for faculty and grad students in statistics that covered many of the same ideas as Software Carpentry.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

I work in the Department of Statistics of a large research university. Our goals are production of research papers, often in collaboration with researchers in other departments, such as life sciences, engineering, or forestry.

Interview with STSci's Perry Greenfield

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Dr. Perry Greenfield of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

We run the Hubble Space Telescope, starting with soliciting and gathering proposals from astronomers that want to use it, to scheduling the selected proposals, generating and uploading telescope commands, processing the downloaded data from raw telemetry to calibrated science images and spectra and providing the results in an archive to the astronomical community. The general goal is to maximize the scientific potential of HST. We are also helping develop the systems needed to run the next large space telescope planned, the James Webb Space Telescope. STScI employs approximately 500 people and is located on the Johns Hopkins University Campus in Baltimore, MD.

Interview with The Hackers Within

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Nicholas Preston, Katy Huff, and Milad Fatenejad of the The Hacker Within at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

The Hacker Within is a student-run, skill-sharing, interest group dedicated to scientific software development at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We typically meet every week or two discuss programming and computation. The meetings are also a good place to ask questions, share ideas, and meet others who use computation in their research.

An Interview with Hans Petter Langtangen

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our latest interview is with Hans Petter Langtangen, author of two books for scientists about Python (and a lot more).

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

I am on 80% leave from the computer science department at the University of Oslo, to work at Simula Research Laboratory. Simula is primarily funded by the government, with a commitment to do long-term fundamental research in three areas: software engineering, networks and distributed systems, and scientific computing. My work is in the latter area. The funding is dependent on a successful scientific evaluation by an international panel every five years. About 120 people work at Simula today.

Interview: Andrew Lumsdaine of Indiana University

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Indiana University's Professor Andrew Lumsdaine.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

One of the reasons the School of Informatics and Computing exists is that computing of various kinds has become part of almost all academic disciplines. The school's goal is to educate students in computer-related areas, as well as traditional computer science, and it's important that the principles of software development be taught. The same holds for my research group, which works in HPC (where the 'P' means both "performance" and "productivity"). There's a huge need for reproducibility in CS research, both for the sake of sound science and also so that people actually can build on each other's work. In order for that to happen, we need some guarantees about quality and reusability, and improving basic skills is a necessary prerequisite.

Interview with Michigan State's Titus Brown

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Professor Titus Brown, from Michigan State University.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

Michigan State is one of the Big Ten and hence a really big place. We do a lot of research, in particular, and a lot of that research is in biology. The Gene Expression in Disease and Development focus group is a collection of molecular biologists at MSU that are interested in gene expression and methods (experimental, genomic, and bioinformatic) for understanding it.

Interview: SciNet's Daniel Gruner

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Dr. Daniel Gruner of SciNet.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

SciNet is a High Performance Computing (HPC) consortium. We provide hardware and software platforms for researchers who require HPC in their work. We are also enabling this research, in ways that had not even been thought of before. The enabling is partly due to us having the largest systems in Canada, and partly by helping people port their codes to run on these very large systems.

Interview with Microsoft's David Rich

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The latest in our series of interviews with Software Carpentry sponsors is with Microsoft's David Rich.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

Microsoft has very recently expanded the group working on HPC (clusters and similar) to address a broader "technical computing" solution set. This includes areas such as parallel programming, and making it easier for scientists and engineers to apply computational power to their work.

Interview: Mark Plumbley at Queen Mary University of London

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today's interview is with Prof. Mark Plumbley, of the Department of Electronic Engineering & Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

We are a new project "Sustainable Software for Digital Music and Audio Research", funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and based at the Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) at Queen Mary University of London. The aim of the project is to provide a Service to support the development and use of software, data and metadata to enable high quality research in the Audio and Digital Music research community. It's really about getting research results—including robust software to implement that research—out to the people who should be able to use them, and then keep it working.

Interview: David Jackson at the UK Met Office

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The second of today's sponsor interviews is with David Jackson from the UK Met Office.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

You can find out more about us at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk, but broadly speaking, we:

predict the weather for tomorrow, next week, next season and beyond;
are a significant contributor to the global understanding of climate change;
are leading researchers of weather science;
provide forecasts for sporting events such as Wimbledon and Open Golf;
stand shoulder to shoulder with Armed Forces around the world;
help keep roads open and planes flying;
inform the decisions and policies of businesses and governments across the world;
help the National Health Service provide preventative healthcare.

Our group is focussed on research.

Interview: SHARCNET's Hugh Couchman

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The first of our two sponsor interviews today is with SHARCNET's Prof. Hugh Couchman.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

SHARCNET provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources and services to researchers in Ontario and Canada. Our goal is to promote and facilitate the use of HPC techniques among researchers in all fields and to train a new generation of computationally-skilled individuals for the benefit of competitive research, the economy and society in Canada.

Interview: Jim Graham of Scimatic

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be interviewing the people whose sponsorship has made this course possible. First up is Scimatic's Jim Graham.

Tell us a bit about your organization and its goals.

Scimatic (www.scimatic.com) is a company that writes software for scientists. Historically, we've written software on contract for manufacturers of scientific equipment. We have also written our own software product, Samples, to help scientists keep their experiments organized.