Talks
Presentations here discuss the origins, strategy, capabilities, and evolution of LIVE envirnoments.
What can LIVE tools do now?
TALK: Seeing the universe, more clearly, with glue & glupyter"
(Goodman, JupyterCon 2023)
In this JupyterCon keynote talk, Harvard's Alyssa Goodman presented the need for high-dimensional visualization. She focused on how the open-source community has reached the point where tools are repurposable and reconfigurable enough to provide software useful along a spectrum of sophistication--ranging from novice learners and educators to code-oriented researchers.
The specific glue-enabled science projects highlighted included discoveries of The Radcliffe Wave and the nature of the Local Bubble around the Sun, as well as the publication of the first augmented reality figure in an American astronomy journal. All of these discoveries are now part of the MilkyWay3D.org effort serving as the Astronomy demonstrator for LIVE.
What makes it much easier to create LIVE today than in the recent past?
TALK: Solara: A Pure Python, React -Style Framework for Scaling Your Data Apps
(Breddels, EuroSciPy 2023)
As Solara creator and Widgetti founder Maarten Breddels explains in this talk, while there are many Python web frameworks out there, most are designed for small data apps or use paradigms unproven for larger scale. Code organization, reusability, and state tend to suffer as apps grow in complexity, resulting in either spaghetti code or offloading to a React application.
Solara addresses this gap. Using a React-like API, we don't need to worry about scalability. React has already proven its ability to support the world's largest web apps.
Solara uses a pure Python implementation of React (Reacton), creating ipywidget-based applications. These apps work both inside the Jupyter Notebook and as standalone web apps with frameworks like FastAPI. This paradigm enables component-based code and incredibly simple state management.
By building on top of ipywidgets, Solara automatically leverages an existing ecosystem of widgets and run on many platforms, including JupyterLab, Jupyter Notebook, Voilà, Google Colab, DataBricks, JetBrains Datalore, and more.
What about designing a purely JupyterLab interface?
TALK: The UX of computational Thinking
(Vives, JupyterCon 2023)
As Quantstack's Gabriela Vives explains in this talk, computational notebooks have changed the way we think about interactive computing. By blending together narration and code, they are widely regarded as a concrete implementation of the concept of literate programming. JupyterLab provides a space for open-ended exploration and creation, creating unique user experience challenges that have been sparsely explored. Photo editing software, development environments, CAD tools, all fall in this category and have similar requirements, such as allowing for a complex tiled layout or displaying a lot of personalized information on the screen. She shows how the foundations of JupyterLab can be reused to build other tools of that category, and presents two examples with the JupyterCAD and glue-Jupyter projects. The talk shows first steps of the JupyterLab UX initiative, ranging from the triaging of issues to the set up of user tests.
AAS 224 IN NEW ORLEANS: Data-Sharing in Astronomy Special Session (1/11/24)
In January 2024, the leadershp of the American Astronomical Society gaterhed together represenatives of astronomical data archives around the world. LIVE PI Alyssa Goodman was asked to speak there about how LIVE could be used in the near-term future as a way to facilitiate Seamless, interconnected, data-rich, exploration and visualization environments for astronomers. Slides are available in Keynote and PDF formats at Goodman's Talks page, and shown as a slides-only video here.
AAS 224 IN NEW ORLEANS: Visualization Workshop (1/7/24)
The LIVE Astro talk Google Slideshow here was delivered by Jackie Faherty at the AAS Visualization Workshop on 1/7/24 in New Orleans, on behalf of Alyssa Goodman If you've reached this site on or soon after 1/7, please note that it's so new that it's only "almost" ready for primetime, so "pardon our dust" on unfinished sections!
