Change the future

Accepted Posters

Retrieving Meaning from Words

Nathaniel Case, Eitan Romanoff in Big Data

FOSS@RIT is an applied research lab at Rochester Institute of Technology focused on promoting free/open source software and open web technologies. Recently, students have been using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) libraries to solve interesting problems involving natural language; analyzing data from political tweets to personal emails.

Plone, the Python CMS

Érico Andrei in Web Frameworks

This poster will feature Plone, the most successful CMS written in Python and one of the most active open source projects.

Fusing Online and Face-to-Face Social Networks with Python and RFIDs

Andre Panisson, Marco Quaggiotto, Ciro Cattuto in Science

We describe the architecture of an application designed to enhance social interactions at conference gatherings by integrating data from online social networks and from wearable proximity sensors. The pipeline that processes the stream of sensor data and provides proximity-based services is implemented in Python and Twisted, and has been demonstrated to scale to thousands of simultaneous users.

David vs Goliath: Fighting Big Budgets with Python

Michael Waud, Eric Palakovich Carr in Industry Uses

How do you compete with well funded corporations and other institutions when you’re a non-profit? Use Python to take advantage of the resources you didn’t know you had and compete for grants you thought you couldn’t get. Python has helped our small organization piggyback new research on existing efforts, win more grants, and share more ideas.

A Fast and Efficient Python Development Process for Small Teams

Eric Palakovich Carr, Michael Waud in Best Practices/Patterns

Ever had a feature take too long, not work, and make everybody crazy? Our small team has learned some great tips to speed up development without sacrificing quality and stability. Come see these hard learned ideas, and how they can be applied to your team.

PyOracle - Analysis of Musical Structure Using Python

Greg Surges in Other

PyOracle is an project using Python to analyze aspects of musical structure. Audio Oracle, an algorithm based on the Factor Oracle string matching algorithm, is used to detect introductions and repetitions of musical materials. Through this analysis, aspects of musical structure can be understood, and new versions of the analyzed work can be created.

Developing an Early College IT/CS/Math Program Using Python

Jeffrey Elkner, Isaac Zawolo, Kevin Reed in Education

This poster will present a summary of lessons learned and best practices developed for teaching programming and web development suffused with mathematics in a dual enrollment curriculum with non-traditional programming students.

Atabox

Ian McJohn in Embedded Systems

The Atabox is an $8 computer based of the Atmega328. It runs the webLinux Os and supports the bitlash and c programming languages. I am hoping to port python to the platform but have had no luck so far. It costs $8-$10 dollars. The interface is command line, but supports further graphical modifications.

Python, CSS, and Genetic Algorithms

Ryan Brown in Systems Administration

Web developers everywhere have heard of minifying Javascript and CSS to decrease asset sizes and make Web pages load faster. With Python we can go beyond minification using genetic algorithms to compress CSS. Using the tinycss library we can apply a bipartite algorithm to any stylesheet to beat standard minification techniques by 10%.

"Web Scale" Global Server Load Balancing

Alan Wang, Alex Laslavic, Doug Porter in Other

Want to learn how facebook scales their load balancing infrastructure to support more than a billion users? We will be revealing the technologies and methods we use to route and balance Facebook's traffic. This talk will focus on Facebook's DNS load balancer and software load balancer, and how we use these systems to improve user performance, manage capacity, and increase reliability.

Python XMPP

Arc Riley, Lance Stout, Mayank Singh in Useful Libraries

XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is a versatile protocol used for chat, social networking, content distribution, cloud management, embedded devices, and more. This poster covers several modern Python packages that make working with XMPP easier and examples of applications built with them.

An Introspective Hypervisor for Software Analysis

Richard Gloo, Stephen Pape, Josh White in Useful Libraries

In this poster we present a system for unobtrusive software analysis using IntoVirt. IntroVirt is an introspective hypervisor architecture that supports advanced analysis techniques to include complete guest monitoring and interaction, as well as manipulation and blocking of system calls. The IntroVirt stack is written in C++, but has recently been extended to include Python bindings.

Mutation Testing in Python

Sebastian Kreft in Testing

The elcap tool, a nose plugin, presents a flexible mutation testing tool for python. This poster introduces common testing terms related to mutations, basic examples, test statistics for some of the major python packages as well as some key aspects we need to think about when writing tests.

Django Appointment Slots

Amol Kher in Best Practices/Patterns

Best Practices for creating and booking Appointment Slots functionality. Many services marketplaces need or will need to build a system such as this. Building a booking system in-house gives you far better control and a much more elegant workflow rather than using a third-party scheduling service. We hope to share what we have learnt over the past year doing so.

Is Python Newbie Friendly

Simeon Franklin in Education

Python is increasingly used as a teaching language for new programmers and touted as an easy language to learn for experienced developers. Its self proclaimed virtues of beauty, explicitness, simplicity and readability certainly should make it newbie and user-friendly... and mostly do. I'd like to talk with other Pythonistas about the parts that suck and what we can do to fix them!

Pony Object-Relational Mapper

Alexey Malashkevich in Databases/NoSQL

Pony is an object-relational mapper implemented in Python. It allows writing advanced SQL queries using plain Python in the form of a generator expression. This way queries look very concise.

Read the Docs

Eric Holscher in Documentation

This poster will feature the site Read the Docs. It hosts documentation and other text related materials that are created with the Sphinx Documentation Generator. Come on by the poster to chat about Read the Docs, or talk about anything documentation related!

We Have, We Need - Disaster Relief in the Modern World

Jon Wong, Wes Vetter in Education

We Have, We Need is a student-led project at the University of California, San Diego. WHWN is a supply-sharing and communication platform created for humanitarians and NGOs in disaster/crisis zones, currently targeted toward relief efforts in Haiti. Come learn how we cope with issues like frequent developer turnover, limited budgets, fluctuating team size, and varying experience levels.

Teaching Python to Young Adults - "Invent with Python"

Al Sweigart in Education

Finding polished but free resources to teach programming to kids can be difficult. "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" is a book that is freely available under a Creative Commons license, and gives the source code for many simple games so that readers (young adults or adult adults) can see what programs "look like".

Luigi - Batch Data Processing in Python

Elias Freider in Big Data

Luigi is Spotify's recently open sourced Python framework for batch data processing including dependency resolution and monitoring. The framework helps you to organize the execution of inter-dependent recurring tasks and has a streamlined interface for integrating with HDFS and Hadoop MapReduce.

Why Pyramid is Awesome

Éric Araujo in Web Frameworks

Beside the friends, walls and photos, Facebook is a platform where anybody can build applications or games taking advantage of the huge user base and connections between people. Any web-capable language or framework can be used to do that, but this poster will show you why Pyramid is a most excellent choice.

Biomedical Ontologies with Python

Ryan Freckleton in Science

Biomedical ontologies are large, graphical data structures that describe concepts in biology and medicine. An ongoing area of research is determining how to integrate these from different sub-domains, since they are too large to integrate by hand. This describes an elaborate approach using machine learning and distributed computing, implemented in python.

Mypy: Optional Static Typing for Python

Jukka Lehtosalo in Core Python (Language, Stdlib)

Mypy is an experimental Python variant that supports seamless mixing of dynamic and static typing. The implementation can type check programs with optional type annotations and translate them to readable Python 3. The long-term goal of the project is to develop an ahead-of-time compiler that generates efficient native code.

Mining Twitter Feeds

Vishnu Nath in Big Data

A Twitter application that performs a wide variety of functions, ranging from the simple and direct function like posting a Tweet and reading personal tweets, to data mining actions like computing number of common friends and followers, a person's Twitter influence, currently trending topics on Twitter displayed in a fancy tag cloud, commonly related topics, retweeting analysis, etc.

The State of PyCscope

Peter Portante in Core Python (Language, Stdlib)

PyCscope V1.0 has been released and we want to bring folks up to speed on the current state of its features and a bit about how it works.

Collecting & Analyzing Financial Data

Alex Xu in Education

No matter what type of investor you are, short term swing trader or long term fundamentalist, we all agree that data is an important element to making a financial decision. This poster will outline the details of how one can use Python and Scipy to collect and analyze data in the arena of the stock market using real time data from various sources to help outline some key numbers to help investors.

Hermes - Python messaging at Spotify

Neville Li in Distributed Computing

How Spotify builds large scale distributed system with Python and the Hermes framework.

Biological Data Integration and Application for Personalized Cancer Treatment

Hyungyong Kim, Jaeyoung Shim in Industry Uses

Personalized approach is important in the area of cancer treatment. We constructed a data-warehouse which integrates 3 ontologies and 4 clinical databases semantically using Django's ORM. For the clinical use, a mobile web application was developed so that patients can get their personal pharmaceutical information about cancer therapy.

Mystic: A Framework for Predictive Science

Michael McKerns in Science

We have built a robust optimization framework (mystic) that lowers the barrier to solving complex problems in predictive science. mystic provides tools for constraining design space and targeting unique solutions, including suites of standard and statistical constraints, discrete math, uncertainty quantification, and symbolic math. mystic is built from the ground up to leverage parallel computing.

Reverse Engineering the Internet of Things

Issac Kelly in Cloud

This year I've reverse engineered two HTTP/Web enabled devices and written python clients for them. The Belkin Wemo [1] and the Philips Hue [2]. My poster session will cover methods materials and work.

[1] http://www.issackelly.com/blog/2012/08/04/wemo-api-hacking/ [2] http://www.issackelly.com/blog/2012/11/10/philips-hue-api-hacking/

Connecting Disparate Data Sources with Toothpick

Andrew Roberts in Databases/NoSQL

Toothpick is an open-source data-mapping framework written in Python for building lightweight, easy-to-use models of diverse, schema-optional data sources. It is geared

Darkserver: Help to Debug Userspace

Kushal Das in Other

Darkserver is a set of tools and service written in Python to help developers to debug their applications & libraries. Darkserver project was started to use Build-ID feature of compiler toolchains and help developer tools to identify exact package builds from which process images (e.g. core dumps) come. This can enable their analysis, debugging profiling.

Spatial Clustering in Python

Shane Grigsby in Science

Density-based clustering allows the identification of objects from unstructured data. The DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithms allow clustering and classification of remotely-sensed points into objects; however, current implementations have been unable to handle the data volume produced by LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging). Using modified kd-trees as a spatial index allows for increased scalability.

Serpint - Controlling Raspberry Pi GPIO with a Serial Port/Socket

Louis Goessling in Other

Serpint is software for controlling the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi over a socket or serial port. It can be used to control the GPIO pins from languages that don't already have a GPIO library, but do for sockets or serial, or from programs that expect a serial port, and do that from half a world away.

Livecode Python Training Tools at Bank of America

Chris Laffra in Education

Demo/experience report of Quartz Academy, livecode tooling developed at Bank of America to teach Python plus a trading platform to thousands of internal users.

Enabling High Throughput Immunobiology by Integrating Django, numpy, matplotlib, and SQLAlchemy

Jacob Rothenbuhler in Best Practices/Patterns

Nodality is applying a novel technology, Single Cell Network Profiling (SCNP), to reveal biology and predict clinical outcome. We face unique engineering challenges related to lab workflows, mining complex data, and presenting data in compelling interactive visuals. We will share design and implementation considerations for integrating heterogeneous software tools needed to meet these challenges.

ApsimRegions: A Gridded Modeling Framework for the APSIM Crop Model

David Stack in Science

This poster demonstrates how Python can be used in the Environmental and Earth Systems Sciences to create a framework for automating the process of preparing input, running in parallel, and processing output from existing computer models. The framework discussed, ApsimRegions, uses many built-in and third-party Python packages to accomplish these tasks specifically for the APSIM crop growth model.

DaNKInDaB - A New Approach to Servers

Marco Montanari in Useful Libraries

The idea of having a web-configurable web/application server with virtualhosting support using the best Python-based tools to integrate into the company toolset for the development team has always been intriguing to me. This tool tries to create a complete webserver enabling easy deployment of apps on on-premises hardware for both the lucky ones having a private cloud, and for those who don't.

Powering Recommendations with Distributed Computing using Python and MapReduce

Marcel Caraciolo in Big Data

It will present how to build scalable recommender systems with Map-Reduce Paradigm and Python (including the packages Crab, MrJob, Scipy and Numpy). Recommender Systems are systems that analyzes the user preferences in data format and estimate the items of interest for that user. It is applicable in several domains such as search, medicine, e-commerces and social networks.

GR - A Universal Framework for Visualization Applications

Josef Heinen in Other

For the creation of visualization programs there are a number of free and commercial tools and libraries. In a heterogeneous environment it points out that there is no universal solution that covers the specific needs in a scientific environment. GR is a framework for cross-platform visualization applications ranging from publication quality 2D graphs to the representation of complex 3D scenes.

Soundscape from Ocean Color Satellite Data

Luiz Irber, Arnaldo Russo in Science

Ocean data analysis usually uses visual methods to explore and find patterns. We propose a sonification method using sounds from ocean data.

Beginners Welcome: From Zero to GUIs in Four Months, via Writing a Tutorial

Marta Maria Casetti in Education

Discover how in four months I went from insecure beginner to happy writer of a GUI toolkit documentation!

rpy2: Use R from the Comfort of Python

Laurent Gautier in Big Data

R has become hard to avoid when working with data; there is hardly a method in statistics or visualization that is not available, and there are many methods that are originally only available in R.

The Python-to-R bridge opens the whole library of R functions, classes, and datasets to the Python programmer by exposing an embedded R process and its objects through a Python library.

XBlock: Courseware Components from edX

Ned Batchelder in Education

edX.org is building XBlock, an open-source component architecture for courseware. It provides API's for creating course components of all kinds. Possible uses include: simple controls, new types of problems, new quiz structures, interactive simulations, and new navigation techniques. We're hoping to expand awareness of XBlock, and also to hear from potential users about their needs.

Data Classification Using Python, Django and R

Meenal Pant in Industry Uses

For a recent project, I had to develop a real time diagnostics tool with a web dashboard. The goal of this tool was to assist data experts with proactive monitoring and trouble-shooting our equipment deployed in the field. So I decided to design a real time web dashboard with status updates and email alerts using Python, Django and R.

Responsive Web Apps with Unreliable HTTP Requests Inside the Request/Response Cycle

Michael Newman in Useful Libraries

Pushing the response time of your web app and keep running into problems with 3rd party APIs? Requests provides a solid method to rein in those unruly calls that haunt your web apps' response time metrics. In this poster, I will show how to expect failure from these external calls and make multiple calls concurrently to improve the overall speed and reliability of your app.

Next-Generation Immunobiology Data Integration, Analysis and Visualization

Alan Barber II in Industry Uses

Nodality has pioneered a novel flow cytometry-based technology in the areas of oncology and autoimmunity to reveal underlying disease biology. We present a custom framework written in Python that uses Django, Matplotlib, MongoDB and Pandas to join this experimental data with clinical facts such as individual patient disease outcomes to develop actionable biological and clinical information.

Deploying Scalable Django Stacks to the Cloud with Juju

Kapil Thangavelu in Cloud

The most difficult part of Django deployment is the supporting infrastructure. Juju simplifies deployment and scaling in the cloud by distilling this logic into reusable charms that are orchestrated by Juju. In this session, I'll show how to use Juju to set up Django stacks by deploying charms, including custom ones, and relating them together.