Hello,

This is to gauge interest in a 3 day seminar introducing coding and development practices through MATLab and Python, as well as version control with Git.  The goal is to give participants basic proficiency and the ability to develop their skills according to their own interests.  Many people in the department use coding in their research (myself included,) but we have no system in place for teaching it to grad students who do not have prior experience.  I would like to try to correct that.  This seminar would spend a minimum of time introducing people to coding environments, concepts and commands, and spend as much as possible on short projects of interest to the participants.  Potential topics could include numerical solution schemes to ordinary or partial differential equations, Bayesian methods, analysis of large data sets, non-linear optimization methods or whatever people would like.

I would like to run it half days from Aug 14-16, but those dates and times are flexible.  While anyone is welcome, this will be geared toward graduate students in the department with little to no coding experience.

If you would like to attend, please let me know a little about your research interests.  I will introduce concepts and projects in the context of those interests as much as I can, though I can't promise to get through everything.  If you are interested, please try to let me know by August 1.  While I am happy to take any drop ins, knowing as much as possible about participant numbers and interests in advance is helpful in planning.

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know!

Best,
Sean Horan