Engineering, Science, and Art

Three talks, sponsored by Jana (http://jana.com), covering a wide range of disciplines!

Dan O'Brien, Scripting best practices

When you're using Python as a scripting language, as your script gets more and more complicated, Python tends to push you in the direction of writing better code, which is one of the things that's great about the language—and there's no need to resist! This talk will cover ideas like breaking functionality out into functions and encapsulating state into classes, with a handful of increasingly-complicated examples.

Milos Miljkovic, Automating cell identification

Problem: On a microscope slide, mark 400-600 cells for data collection, all done manually by poor grad students. Solution: Image the whole slide, sort cells automatically according to size and data quality, extract usable pixels, tag them, and store in a database. Bonus: Lots of beer from happy grad students, university patented it.

Vik Paruchuri, Algorithmically generated art

(I'll be honest with you: I don't know exactly what Vik means by this, but it will be good!)