Coming to an EclipseCon 2016 near you: Science!

I’m pretty psyched about EclipseCon 2016 in North America, which is happening March 7-10 in Reston VA (more info on the conference page). It was my distinct privilege to serve on the Program Committee this year, especially with such an awesome group of committee members. We worked really hard to put together an awesome program, but what has me most excited this year is all the Science! 😀

The Eclipse Foundation is home to the Science Working Group and this year the group is coming out in force at EclipseCon. Following on the success of the “Science Track” at EclipseCon Europe in November 2015, we decided to have a track at EclipseCon North America too. This works much better for the working group than a dedicated day of talks because we scientists won’t spend a whole day in our own room missing the rest of the conference.

The Science track covers tooling for scientific workbenches, performing data analysis, visualization, modeling in a scientific field and really any science-related topic. We have 11 standard talks and one tutorial at EclipseCon 2016. This is in addition to all the normal shenanigans, like cool stickers (courtesy Tim Jagenberg),

and failed experiments mixing coffee, ice cream and beer,

The full list of talks is available on the Session Page. While I’m very excited for all of the talks, here are the three that I want to see the most:

• Eclipse Tooling in Julia, Tobias Verbeke – I’m excited about this talk because I tried to use Julia a few months back, but got turned off by the lack of tooling. Tobias’ company, Open Analytics NV, developed some very snazzy tools for working with R, so I can’t wait to see what they have for Julia. For those who don’t know, Julia is a language for high-performance numerical and scientific computing.
• How computers have broken science (and how we can fix it), Greg Watson – This talk is focusing on a subject near and dear to my heart… er… PhD thesis: Simulation Lifecycle Management. Greg and I have talked about this for awhile now, so I’m interested to see his take on it and what he thinks about how the Eclipse Platform can become *the* SLM tool.
• Multi-Mission Operations and Planning, Regent L Acheveque – I’m an astrophysicist and this talk on Symphony combines Eclipse and outer space. How can I resist? Even if I didn’t know about Symphony from a great lunch time discussion with Regent last year, space plus Eclipse is totally irresistible to me.

The single tutorial from Science this year is on Eclipse ICE, (which is a project that I lead). This is ICE’s first “big” tutorial and it should cover most of what there is to learn about working with Eclipse for scientific computing. It includes tutorial information for ICE, the Parallel Tools Platform and the Eclipse Advanced Visualization Project.

The Science Working Group has several other things planned for the conference this year, including our Annual Meeting where we will discuss the state of the group and where the group’s Steering Committee will elect its officers for next year. The group is completely open to everyone, so if you want to join us for any of this additional stuff then please do.

I hope this post excites you about the Science talks at Eclipse Con 2016 and that I get to see you in Reston in March! If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way on Twitter to @jayjaybillings or to @EclipseScience for the whole community.