Eric J Ma's Website

Conferences are made up of people, just like any other group of human beings grouping together.

What makes one differ from another really boils down to the people.

I read a tweet recently that described the SciPy 2015 conference as... (read more)

The conference is over! I get to go home now, but I also will miss being a part of the community. Hope to go back next year!

Thoughts

1. It was fun to set so many new people from a variety of disciplines. This... (read more)
   (481 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)

Morning Session

1. Will millenials ever get married?: Survival analysis made simple.
2. Distarray: A tool to do distributed computing on numpy arrays.
3. Teaching with Jupyter:... (read more)
   (129 words, approximately 1 minute reading time)

The final tutorial that I sat in today was the intermediate computational statistics tutorial. This was led by Chris Fonnesbeck, prof at Vanderbilt University, fellow Vancouverite, also one of the maintainers of the PyMC3 package.

This morning, I attended the Geospatial Data tutorial. It wasn’t a filled lecture hall, but that was likely because the topic is a bit more specialized. That said, I think it was a tutorial with great content. Part of my own research work may... (read more)

I sat in the Bokeh/Blaze tutorial this afternoon. It was a challenging tutorial, but a good one nonetheless. I could tell that our tutorial leader, Christine, put in quite a bit of effort in preparing the... (read more)

This morning, I sat in the Cython tutorial by Kurt Smith, of Enthought, at SciPy 2015. We’re only halfway in at the time of starting the writing, but it has been a really useful tutorial!

Tutorial Content

Kurt... (read more)

Observation:

1. Humans like to measure things.
2. Humans also like to evaluate things.
3. Humans usually like to have only one metric for evaluations.

Example: Academic performance.

1. Performance is... (read more)
   (154 words, approximately 1 minute reading time)

On Monday, I gave my first ever lighting talk at the Boston Python meetup. Though I was kinda nervous right before the talk, overall, I found it to be really fun! My main message was that we should write tests for our data when doing data... (read more)

Yesterday, I decided to go for a 5K run on my own. This was a break from my usual routine (which is a routine, now that I’ve finished it at 4 regular intervals) - I solo’d it, rather than running with my running buddy Lin (I didn’t ask him ahead of... (read more)