Dear SAGE developers, William and I are considering organizing SAGE days at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), probably somewhere in the summer of 2008, subject to securing the required funding. Both for the effectiveness of the meeting and for the purposes of getting funding, it is good to give a specific theme to the meeting. At this point we are open to suggestions. Points to keep in mind:
- Themes that coincide with active development or badly needed development on sage are a little better - Themes that allow big shot speakers to be invited are a little better (helps finding funding and some of them can even be fun to listen to) - Themes that allow participation of undergraduates are a little better (again, helps finding funding) (of course, there is nothing wrong with having coding sprints and/or break-out sessions on topics that do not directly relate to the theme) One possible theme would be visualization and long range collaboration. SFU happens to have good equipment for this and has activity and experience in it. Sage is definitely in need of good visualization tools. Often, people turn to maple, matlab or mathematica simply to make pictures, so this is really an important use of a CAS. It is also a theme that has a low threshold for undergrad participation. Finding big shot speakers is perhaps a little harder. Suggestions welcome. Feel free to email me off list if that is more appropriate. The long range collaboration bit perhaps deserves some explanation. Consider a situation where people are in a real-time collaboration situation, for instance communicating via an audio/video link. It is common to have a common "whiteboard" in scenarios like that (essentially a shared drawing application, where people share the canvas) Perhaps it would be preferable to have a really intelligent canvas, i.e., a sage session? This could be either a notebook problem (how to handle a notebook that is opened by several clients simultaneously) or it could consist of two separate SAGE sessions with some shared objects. Formulated in the latter form, it has much in common with parallel computing, except that now two nodes get user input instead of a strict master/slave relation. It remains to be seen whether this is actually usable and/or preferable over other collaboration methods, but it is certainly a novel way of using a CAS and, thanks to its open architecture, SAGE would be by far the most suited. Anyway, if you have any ideas, either on a vis/coll theme or on some alternative theme, I would be happy to hear from you, either on this list or via off-list via email if more appropriate. Kind regards, Nils Bruin --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
