Octave Conference 2017

20 Mar 2017, 08:30 → 22 Mar 2017, 19:00 Europe/Zurich

CERN

Overview

We are happy to announce the upcoming Octave Conference 2017 to be held at CERN [1], near Geneva, Switzerland, from March 20th until March 22nd. Octave [2] is a fundamental tool of analysis and research for hundreds of CERN scientists and, like CERN, promotes values of openness, cooperation, diversity, quality and commitment.

The three-day event will be an opportunity for sharing experiences, planning the future of Octave and promoting its use among the scientific community and beyond. There will two open sessions on Monday and Tuesday showcasing Octave and some interesting and successful Octave stories.

We are finalising the details of the programme, which will include: a presentation by Octave's creator and main maintainer John W. Eaton in the CERN Main Auditorium (Monday afternoon), several interesting talks about applications of Octave to various scientific domains, a Code Sprint, and a session to promote the open-source supported by public institutions as a model for free and successful development.

The key members of the Octave development team will participate in the conference, both from oversea and from Europe. You can find updated information on the programme in the Wiki page [4] and we are filling the Indico timetable.

 

Social events

Two social events have been foreseen, besides the coffee and the lunch breaks:
* A unique visit to CERN [5] on Wednesday morning
* A Fondue [6] dinner down-town Geneva on Monday evening (an option for Vegans exists)

 

Registration

Please use the registration form below to register your attendance. Early registrations are preferable to help us on the logistics side. Please contact us with recommendations and if you have any further ideas or particular wishes.

The conference is free of charge, however donations (e.g. to support the travel of developers from oversea) are welcome. Details can be found in the Octave wiki [4].

We look forward to seeing you at OctConf 2017!

The local organising committee:

Andrea Latina, BE-ABP-LAT
John Evans, IT-CDA-AD
Melissa Gaillard, IT-DI
 

Logistics

How to get to CERN
Visiting CERN... important instructions

 

Accommodation

The conference will take place in the CERN's main site (Meyrin). You can try your luck and search for an accommodation in one of the CERN Hostels.

Should the CERN hostels be full, or should you prefer to stay in Geneva, we advise you to consult your favourite on-line booking portal (www.booking.com, www.tripadvisor.com, www.trivago.com, www.expedia.com etc.) and to contact the hotel directly in order to identify the lowest tariff available for CERN users and collaborators (preferential tariffs may apply in some cases).

Hotels in the vicinity of "Gare Cornavin" (Geneva's main railway station), or along "Route de Meyrin", are particularly recommended. Tram number 18 links Gare Cornavin to CERN in 20' (see timetable on the TPG's webpage at this link). 

Notice that, by staying in hotel, youth hostel or at a campsite, you are entitled to receive a personal and non transferable Geneva Transport Card for free, which will allow you to use the whole public transportation system of Geneva for the length of your stay for free. This includes buses, trams, trains, and yellow taxi-boats - Mouettes. Just ask for it upon arrival on the reception.

 

Useful links

[1] http://home.cern
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/octave
[3] https://indico.cern.ch/event/609833 (this page!)
[4] http://wiki.octave.org/OctConf_2017
[5] http://visit.cern/tours
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondue

DSCF1992.jpg

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Monday 20 March

09:00 → 09:30 Registration

09:30 → 09:40 Welcome to CERN

09:30 Welcome to CERN

Speaker: Frederic Hemmer (CERN)

09:35 Conference info

Speakers: Andrea Latina (CERN), John Evans (CERN)

OctConf2017_Info.pdf

09:40 → 10:30 Applications

09:40 Octave for N dimensions and microscope image processing

Speaker: Carnë Draug

octave-image-processing.pdf

10:10 Octave for Particle Accelerator Performance Optimization

Speaker: Andrea Latina (CERN)

DEMO.pptx

OctConf_Pres.pdf

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 12:30 Applications

11:00 Publish your code with Octave

Speaker: Kai Torben Ohlhus

octconf2017-publish-ohlhus-slides.pdf

11:30 Discussion

12:30 → 12:40 Group Photo

12:40 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 15:40 CERN Open Session

14:00 25 Years of Octave: Recent Developments and Future Directions

GNU Octave (octave.org) development began in 1992. Now, 25 years later, the project is more active than ever before. This talk will touch on the history of the project, significant recent developments, and plans for the future.

GNU Octave is a free-software scientific programming language with a powerful mathematics-oriented syntax that is largely compatible with Matlab. It includes built-in plotting and visualization tools and can run in GUI mode, as a command-line application, or invoked as part of a shell script. Octave runs on a wide variety of systems, including GNU/Linux, macOS, BSD, and Windows.

Speaker: John W. Eaton

15:40 → 16:10 Coffee break

16:10 → 18:30 Code Sprint

19:30 → 21:30 Fondue Dinner

Tuesday 21 March

09:00 → 10:30 Projects

09:00 GSoC project: Exponential Integrators

Speaker: Chiara Segala

presentation.pdf

09:30 SOCIS project: Improve iterative methods for sparse linear systems

Speaker: Cristiano Dorigo

presentationDorigo.pdf

10:00 Discussion

10:30 → 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 → 12:35 Projects

11:00 Support of free software in public institutions: the KiCad case

KiCad [1] is a tool to help electronics designers develop Printed Circuit Boards (PCB).

CERN's BE-CO-HT section has been contributing to its development since 2011 [2]. These efforts are framed in the context of CERN's activities regarding Open Source Hardware (OSHW), and are meant to provide an environment where design files for electronics can be shared in an efficient way, without the hurdles imposed by the use of proprietary formats.

The talk will start by providing some context about OSHW and the importance of using Free Software tools for sharing design files. We will then move on to a short KiCad tutorial, and finish with some considerations about the role public institutions can play in developing and fostering the use of Free Software, and whether some of the KiCad experience can apply in other contexts.

[1] http://kicad-pcb.org/
[2] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki

Speaker: Javier Serrano (CERN)

Kicad_IT_Talk.pdf

Kicad_IT_Talk.pptx

oct_conf_kicad_03_2017.pdf

11:25 KiCad demo

Speaker: Tomasz Wlostowski (CERN)

11:45 KiCad: questions and discussion

12:00 GSoC project: ode15{i,s}

Speaker: Francesco Faccio

FHN.mp4

OctConf - ode15{i,s}.pdf

12:20 The future of the Neural Network package

Speaker: Francesco Faccio

nnet_OctConf.pdf

nnet_OctConf.pptx

12:35 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 15:30 Projects

14:00 Technical overview of user code parallelization

Speaker: Olaf Till

14:30 8/16-bit simulation with GNU Octave

Speaker: Andreas Stahel

atan16.m

atan32.cc

ChebyshevApproximation.m

Chebyshev.m

OctConf2017Talk.pdf

15:00 Status of Octave-Forge

Speaker: Oliver Heimlich

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 18:30 Code Sprint

Wednesday 22 March

09:00 → 09:30 Unconference

09:45 → 13:00 CERN Visit

13:00 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 15:30 Unconference

15:30 → 16:00 Coffee break

16:00 → 17:15 Organization of OctConf2018

17:15 → 17:30 Closing and Farewell