IDEaS Summer Workshop Teaches Skills for Scientific Computing and Data Science

Many graduate students in science and engineering are finding scientific computing and data science increasingly important in their research, but they typically have little to no formal training in these areas. To help close this gap, in July and August, IDEaS sponsored a five-week summer skills workshop on Python programming, numerical linear algebra, machine learning, databases, and parallel programming. Over 60 graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members attended the workshop, which featured a series of lectures by Professors Edmond Chow, David Sherrill, Polo Chau, and Ling Liu. Teaching assistants led hands-on coding sessions to reinforce concepts introduced in the lectures, and they demonstrated how to use GitHub for version control and collaborative programming. Students commented that the workshop “introduced many state-of-the-art technologies in a short time,” that it was “very helpful and efficient.”