Guests

Past special guests on the inSCIght podcast include:

Jonathan Ashdown is a PhD Candidate of Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an instructor of electrical engineering technology at Hudson Valley Community College. His concentration is in communication systems and signal processing, and he performs research in the area of ultrasonic wireless communication through acoustic-electric channels including thick metal walls. He is also the chair of the Schenectady branch of the IEEE Education Society. (Episode 8)

Ayah Bdeir is an engineer and interactive artist that graduated from the MIT Media Lab and before receiving a fellowship at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in New York. She taught graduate classes at NYU and Parsons, and was a mentor in the regional reality tv-show Stars of Science promoting science and technology innovation in the Middle East. In 2010, Ayah was granted a fellowship with Creative Commons in recognition of her work, including spearheading the first Open Hardware definition and co-chairing the Open Hardware Summit at the New York Hall of Science in September of 2010. Ayah is the creator of littleBits, an award winning kit of pre-assembled circuits made easy by tiny magnets, now in production. She is also the founder of Karaj, Beirut’s lab for experimental art, architecture and technology. Ayah lives and works between Beirut and New York. (Episode 9)

Neil Best is a database manager at the University of Chicago’s Computation Institute (CI) and a graduate student in Geography & Environmental Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. He is applying the reproducible research paradigm to the creation of a hybrid land-use/land-cover data set from multiple geospatial data sets using R and Sweave. The product of this work will initialize models of economy/agriculture/climate change interactions that will run in high-performance computing environments at the CI. (Episode 5)

Chris Colbert is a scientific software developer at Enthought Inc. with a background in mechanical engineering, robotics, and computer vision. He feels that Python + Cython provides one of the most formidable computing platforms available today; striking a superb balance between performance, library support, and developer productivity. (Episode 6)

Craig DeForest is a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. He has studied the Sun for over 20 years, with an emphasis on image processing and data analysis. He organized and exploited the first science program executed by the SOHO spacecraft in the 1990s. He abandoned the commercial IDL environment in 1999 and has been a developer for PDL ever since, contributing the range() operator and PDL::Transform module for coordinate transformations and image resampling. Application work includes SWAMIS, a computer vision code optimized for tracking solar magnetic features, and FLUX, a novel magnetohydrodynamic simulation code that uses Perl/PDL as a front end and data conditioning environment. (Episode 7)

Alicia Gibb is a researcher and rapid prototyper at Bug Labs (http://www.buglabs.net). When she’s not doing research on the crossroads of open technology and innovation, she’s prototyping artwork that blinks, twitches, and might even be tasty to eat. She is a catalyst in the open hardware movement, and co-chaired the first Open Hardware Summit in the fall of 2010. At Bug Labs she runs the academic research program and the Test Kitchen, an open R&D Lab, her current project is an NSF funded project to make a device for measuring physics classroom experiments. She has a master’s degree in information science and in art history. (Episode 9)

Karl Glazebrook is a professor in the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing at the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Karl chimes in occasionally on the PDL user list from his iPad with an elegant and idiomatic solution to a problem that others have been dancing around. And, by the way, Karl is also the inventor of PDL. We all owe it to him. Karl an observational astronomer doing research and teaching. Research interests include observational cosmology and the formation and evolutionary history of galaxies. (Episode 7)

Marcus Hanwell received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Sheffield, UK, in 2003 and 2007, respectively. He spent a summer in Silicon Valley at a startup company in 2002, and participated in the Google Summer of Code program in 2007, as a student, and from 2008-2010, as a mentor with the KDE project. In 2011 Marcus led VTK’s application to be a mentoring organization, which was accepted, and acted as the primary organization administrator and mentor to one project concerned with chemistry visualization in VTK (Episode 19).

Brett Hoerner is a software engineer and pseudo-ops guy at Disqus. He focuses on backend features, scalability, and analytics. He has a passing knowledge of most popular open source NoSQL databases and Disqus has used MongoDB, Redis, Hadoop, and Membase in production. (Episode 11)

Luis Ibanez is a Technical Leader at Kitware, Inc. He has been one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) for the past ten years of the project. He is one of the Editors of the Insight Journal, the only Journal with reproducible papers in the medical imaging field. (Episode 5, 19)

Matthew Kenworthy is a professor in the Faculty of Science at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. Matt maintains the Mac OS X package of SciPDL, a one-click install of the otherwise complicated PDL-from-scratch installation. When he’s not hacking another PDL script together, he’s doing research on exoplanets and high contrast imaging techniques. (Episode 7)

Joe Kerman is an active member of Sector67 in Madison, Wisconsin and has a background in network administration. He ran a local internet service provider for twelve years and now, while in search of a new career he promotes, supports, and takes advantage of the resources at Sector67. Episode 14)

Wes McKinney is a PhD student in Statistical Science at Duke University, focusing on Bayesian methods for time series and other dynamic processes. After undergraduate, he worked for three years at AQR, a quantitative hedge fund, where he developed many research and production systems in Python. Part of his work at AQR was released as the open source project pandas, which he continues to actively develop. He is dedicated to building tools to enhance the use of Python for statistical computing applications, especially those relating to time series and financial applications. Outside of his academic work in statistics, he also does Python consulting work in the financial industry. (Episode 13)

Chris Meyer is the founder of Sector67 in Madison, Wisconsin. He is a recent Masters graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Mechanical Engineering program and kickstarted the Sector67 hacker space with prize and grant money he garnered as a student. (Episode 14)

Travis Oliphant received the PhD from Mayo Graduate School in Biomedical Engineering and taught Electrical Engineering at Brigham Young University for 6 years before devoting himself full-time to developing scientifically-related software and managing customer relationships at Enthought. He is one of the original authors of SciPy and a major NumPy contributor and enjoys reading about neuroscience. (Episode 13)

Sandeep Parikh likes to write code and try out new technologies. His background is in software development and he’s interested in big data and analytics. He’s deployed a few apps on top of MongoDB and has played with Redis, CouchDB and Cassandra. (Episode 11)

Fernando Perez is a research scientist working on the development of algorithms and computational tools for neuroscience at the at the University of California, Berkeley. After a PhD in particle physics and a postdoc in applied mathematics developing numerical algorithms, he currently works at the interface between high-level scientific computing tools in Python and the mathematical questions that arise in the analysis of neuroimaging data. He started the IPython project in 2001 and continues to lead it, now as a collaborative effort with a talented team that does all the hard work. He regularly lectures about scientific computing in Python. (Episode 13)

Duncan Sands usually works on the mathematics of chaos theory for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), a French research institute. Currently he is on leave from the CNRS, working for the Dutch financial company DeepBlueCapital. He became interested in the LLVM project in 2007 while trying to improve the quality of code generated by the GCC compiler for programs written in the Ada programming language. He is the main developer of the dragonegg project, a GCC plugin which replaces the GCC optimizers and code generators with LLVM’s. He has a BSc in mathematics and physics from the University of Western Australia and a PhD, in mathematics, from Cambridge University (England). Having grown up in Australia, he still isn’t quite sure how he ended up living near Paris with his wife and four children. (Episode 15)

Jes Sherman is a second-year PhD student at UCSB who specializes in organic electronics. Her research focuses around the effect of crystal packing on charge transport in organic semiconductors. She also blogs at the ever-irreverent Carbon-Based Curiosities. (Episode 3)

Benjamin Stein is a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is devoted to the improvement of STEM education, tutoring weekly at a local elementary school and participating actively in the Delta program for teaching and learning at UW-Madison. (Episode 14)

Kaitlin Thaney comes to us from Digital Science, a new technology company dedicated to bridging the gaps between the analog and digital research world through tools, services and better use of technology. She comes from the open science world, most recently serving as manager of the science programs at Creative Commons. She is passionate about interoperability, making research more efficient, and, in her spare time, runs a London-based sci/tech meetup called ‘sameAs’. (Episode 0)