The Austin Python Meetup Monthly Meetup

We typically have a main presentation or a series of lightning talks, followed by discussion and Q&A. There is a diversity of domains and experience levels represented, so come with your questions and be prepared to talk about how you use Python!

This will be an online meeting - please join the meetup at the link listed. Please note that this link may update and updates may appear in the discussion section below - so scroll down if you have technical difficulties.

The presentations will start after 7, yet feel free to join starting 6:30.

In this meetup we will have the following presentations:

Talk 1: William Waites will present on "Executable storytelling with rule-based models"

Talk 2: Cliff Kerr will present on “Python vs. the pandemic: writing high-performance models in a jiffy”

Details about the presentations below:

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Talk 1: "Executable storytelling with rule-based models"

Description: Computational models have figured prominently in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Models can have different purposes. Predictive models estimate what will happen in the (usually short term) future. Exploratory models help to understand hypothetical scenarios of either the past or the future. Explanatory models give an account of why things are as they are, or happened as they did. We show a way of constructing models as a narrative with discrete, composable rules implemented in Python with a Domain Specific Language (DSL) made for this purpose. We show how these rule-based stories can be used in exploratory and explanatory ways to help us understand the pandemic and what can be done about it.

Bio: William Waites is an Internet engineer retired to academia. He did PhD work at the intersection of computation and theoretical biology at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics and is now a Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases.

Talk 2: “Python vs. the pandemic: writing high-performance models in a jiffy”

Description: When COVID turned the world upside down last year, politicians and public health officials asked academic disease modelers like us for urgent guidance. In this talk, I will discuss how we built Covasim, our agent-based COVID model, by using standard Python libraries like Numpy/Numba along with less common ones like Sciris. Covasim was created in a few weeks, an order of magnitude faster than the typical model development process, and achieves performance comparable to C++ despite being written in pure Python. It is now being used by researchers and policymakers in more than a dozen countries. For more information, see covasim.org

Bio: Dr. Cliff Kerr is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM), a part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to joining IDM, he taught scientific computing at the University of Sydney, co-founded two startups, worked on a DARPA project teaching robots to pick up balls, and wrote an algorithm to translate real-time brain activity into music