At the May 2024 BIDS Seminar, Stéfan van der Walt presented the Scientific Python project, exploring the history of the ecosystem, the people driving its progress, and its role at UC Berkeley.
The scientific Python ecosystem comprises foundational libraries like NumPy and SciPy, technique-specific libraries like NetworkX and scikit-image, and domain-specific libraries such as PyHEP and AstroPy. We present the Scientific Python project, an effort to better coordinate and support the community of scientific Python ecosystem developers. We place the ecosystem within its historic context, explore the radical open transformation witnessed in, and brought about by, data science, and discuss challenges faced in its growth and maintenance.
Stéfan, a senior research data scientist at BIDS, is deeply involved with open science and the open-source community. He was joined by Fernando Pérez, BIDS Faculty Director, and Jarrod Millman, Executive Director of the Berkeley Open Source Program Office (OSPO) which is housed at BIDS.
Watch the video below to hear from Stéfan, Fernando, and Jarrod.