Eric J Ma's Website

SciPy 2025 is just around the corner, and it's one of my favorite conferences of the year. I wanted to share why I'm looking forward to going to year's event in Tacoma, Seattle.

Back to the Pacific Northwest

SciPy returns to Seattle this year, specifically Tacoma. As someone whose hometown is Victoria, BC, the Pacific Northwest holds a special place in my heart. The PNW in summer is absolutely gorgeous, and beyond the conference itself, the area offers incredible food options and beautiful scenery. Seattle has some of the best Thai food you'll find anywhere—definitely worth exploring between sessions! Perfect for recharging during the conference.

Also, I've got some of my favorite colleagues out there, and like last year, I hope to take the chance to visit them and build bridges across sites.

The community of tool builders

What makes SciPy special is the community. I'm a tool builder at heart, and there's nothing quite like mingling with the folks who create the scientific computing tools that power the Python ecosystem. These are the people whose libraries we import daily, and getting to network with them is invaluable.

Giving back through financial aid

I've been one of the organizers running the financial aid program since around 2015—almost a decade now! This work is particularly meaningful to me because I was once a beneficiary of financial aid while in graduate school. Attending SciPy truly enabled my career, and I'm passionate about providing that same opportunity to others.

My tutorials: LLMs and Network Analysis

This year, I'm excited to be teaching not just one but two tutorials:

Building with LLMs Made Simple (Day 1) - This new tutorial distills what I've learned over the past few years working with large language models both at Moderna and in my personal projects. We'll cover fundamental LLM interactions, extracting structured outputs from text, and if time permits, dive into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Rather than building ambitious systems, we'll focus on teaching practical fundamentals and exchanging ideas.

Network Analysis Made Simple (Day 2) - I've taught this tutorial many times, sometimes solo and sometimes with collaborators like Mridul Seth. It focuses on thinking with graphs and applied network science. What I love about this subject is how versatile graph applications can be—from simpler use cases where graphs serve as powerful data models to more complex implementations like graph neural networks.

Code sprints: where the magic happens

Finally, I'm looking forward to the code sprints—two full days dedicated to contributing to the open-source tools that power our work. Every year I attend the sprints because they're simply fun! It's a great opportunity to give back to projects I use regularly and learn from other contributors. I've also written before why, if you're attending, code sprints are a worthwhile thing to attend -- check out the post here.

If you're on the fence about attending SciPy 2025, I can't recommend it enough. Meeting the tool makers, learning about new libraries, and being part of this vibrant community is an experience unlike any other conference. Hope to see you there!