Before seriously hiring someone to bring Julia into your school, perhaps you first can try the commercial service from http://juliacomputing.com/ to organize some workshops or events to see how the students and other faculties feel about the potential of Julia.
On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 3:26:34 PM UTC-8, ivo welch wrote: > > > ooops...I leaked my signature. not a problem, but it is also was not > necessarily what I had meant to say. for those who are interested, here is > a little background from my side of the world. > > ucla anderson, like most other business schools, has been pretty ignorant > with respect to any kind of research computing expertise. > > this is beginning to change, as management schools (incl us) are moving > towards one-year quantitatively oriented one-year masters program. > anderson already has a masters of financial engineering and is about to > start a masters program in data analytics. as for me, I am also trying to > figure out how to offer more of this to MBA students, our traditional bread > and butter, but it is not clear whether this can be implemented. so, in > the future, we will need more data, programming, and other computing > support than we did in the past. like every other industry. > > it is exceedingly difficult to hire good programmers in a context like > our's. universities do not pay much, for institutional reasons. > individuals that are very good at this tend to be lured away to industry > if they are good, and non-terminable if they are bad. a year goes by very > fast---we may find someone for one year, but then not the next. any > program has to be prepared to run for decades. we cannot shut down a > masters program for lack of a critical person. > > our current IT department (both UCLA and Anderson) mostly handle basics, > such as the network and Microsoft apps. as far as I can tell, > http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/ offers some R expertise, but not Julia > expertise. its depth has varied with the individuals working there. there > is no julia support afaik. > > our best choices are typically individuals that want to get a phd and just > happen to have good expertise. R, julia, etc. another choice would be > someone who wants to work half-time on a project like julia and the other > half-time work on direct program support. job has nice benefits... > > just to get a position approved can take UC about 3-6 months and is a > high-effort affair. we have rules up the wazoo. there is also one month > of data expertise that anyone would want to learn (WRDS, CRSP, Compustat). > I can spend a month full-time to get there. sigh. > > so, for the most part, the few of us faculty and phd students, who like > programming have been bootstrapping it ourselves. at UCLA Anderson, we are > luckier in this respect than many other places (Keith Chen, Peter Rossi, > John Mamer, ...), but it's tough. > > julia expertise would be great for us to have. it would have great > externalities for us. if anyone with deep julia expertise wants to apply > to UCLA for a few years (phd, undergrad, master), with a side job at > Anderson, then drop me an email ;-). for obvious reasons, faculty has and > wants no power to make admission decisions (or we would be besieged by our > friends and family), but I could put in a good word with our admissions > department(s). it matters on the margin. if someone working on julia > wants a regular job, also please email me. > > /iaw > ---- > Ivo Welch ([email protected] <javascript:>) > http://www.ivo-welch.info/ > > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:47 PM, Jeffrey Sarnoff <[email protected] > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> That is a reasonable want; it may take Anderson some time to institute >> scholarships for expertise in Julia >> If you were already expert with Julia, what would you have your students >> doing? >> >> >> for expertThat is a reasonable want. As an alternative, Anderson is >> not offering scholarships earmarked for Julia experts. >> >> On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 3:49:47 PM UTC-5, ivo welch wrote: >>> >>> >>> indeed. thank you, josh. I would add a final chapter at >>> >>> http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/ >>> >>> with a set of links to various further resources, examples, full >>> stand-alone programs, etc. for me, at least, the perl cookbook and sets of >>> self-contained snippet programs to start with, were the main reason why I >>> learned perl many years ago. >>> >>> the key problem to my use of julia over R for my students is that I do >>> not have a resident julia expert at UCLA. this won't change anytime soon, >>> because they are hard to find (hire) :-(. this google forum is great, but >>> it's scary to switch without a double hull. many, many full *working* >>> standalone examples are the next best thing for me. >>> >>> regards, >>> >>> /iaw >>> >>> >>> ---- >>> Ivo Welch ([email protected]) >>> http://www.ivo-welch.info/ >>> J. Fred Weston Distinguished Professor of Finance >>> Anderson School at UCLA, C519 >>> Free Finance Textbook, http://book.ivo-welch.info/ >>> Exec Editor, Critical Finance Review, >>> http://www.critical-finance-review.org/ >>> Editor and Publisher, FAMe, http://www.fame-jagazine.com/ >>> >>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Josh Day <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> I think a lot of what you're looking for already exists. It's just >>>> that things like "run a regression according to variable names" wouldn't >>>> belong in base Julia. If you haven't already, I'd take a look at >>>> StatsBase.jl, DataFrames.jl, and GLM.jl. >>>> >>>> >>>> http://dataframesjl.readthedocs.org/en/latest/io.html#importing-data-from-tabular-data-files >>>> https://github.com/JuliaStats/GLM.jl >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> On Wednesday, February 10, 2016 at 10:58:37 AM UTC-5, ivo welch wrote: >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> ladies and gents---I am not (yet) a julia user. >>>>> >>>>> may I suggest adding more examples into two places where julia users >>>>> will face starting hurdles? >>>>> >>>>> [1] the I/O docs of julia. like, reading and writing csv files that >>>>> are compressed and decompressed on-the-fly, even if not in the ultimate >>>>> efficient manner. a large fraction of the time and frustration of new >>>>> users is consumed by the task of shoehorning data into and out of new >>>>> computer languages. with all of R's problem, the ' d <- >>>>> read.csv("f.csv")' >>>>> and 'd<-read.csv(pipe(paste("gzcat ", fname)))' reduced this entry >>>>> frustration greatly. perhaps xml file reading and writing. perhaps... >>>>> >>>>> [2] more 'standard task' programs would be great. read a csv file, >>>>> run a regression according to variable names on the command line, print >>>>> output, draw a graph. I know there are fragments throughout the docs, >>>>> but >>>>> some section with ready to run complete programs would be good, perhaps >>>>> at >>>>> the end of the manual. >>>>> >>>>> in a year, I hope to switch my students from R to julia. >>>>> >>>>> regards, >>>>> >>>>> /iaw >>>>> >>>>> >>> >
