Monday, May 12, 2008

Object-Oriented Bayesian Inference II

A while ago, I blogged about a little piece of code I had written as an example for my book.

Back then, it was a fun exercise for me, but it was clearly unfinished (and it still is) but worth as an example of how to model a mathematical object, a Bayesian random variate, as a python class.

Despite its simplicity and incompleteness, that example, still attracts attention, and people contact me asking for the code. In order to better serve those interested in this problem, I decided to create a project on google code to host the code.

I am still interested in taking this code further, extending its applicability to real problems. So if anyone is willing to help, the project site will hopefully be a good channel for that.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

New Job

It's been a while since i last posted about python in science. I apologize to my readers, but it has been a very busy couple of months. As a matter of fact it still is (i am writing this on my cell phone while I comute), but let's get to the point.

The reason for this crazyer than usual months is that I switched jobs. I have been offered a job in a private research company called Intelekto. It is a very interesting company, it's business model is based on selling scientific expertise to companies willing to outsource their research and development needs, to an agile, highly focused company that can deliver solutions in a fraction of the time usually taken by regular companies just to mobilize a research team.

I was hired to manage the reserch team: a small core team of highly trained scientists, ready to crunch through the clients' scientific problems. Whenever the needs of a client falls outside the joint expertise of our core team, we hire other scientists, on a per project basis.

Most of the projects we get, involve the development of software. As a good pythonista, I am starting to build the Python skills of my team and am actively hiring good Python developers. I should say that our company is based in Brazil, but we already have global clients, and are interested in expanding our collaboration network with other global players.

Even though I've been at the head of the research team for less than a month, we are already working with Python tools in a couple of our projetcs: Pyro Robotics, to prototype a robot navigation system, and with NetworkX and Igraph for a graph visualization module.

Well, that pretty much sums up the most recent news. I hope to post about our experiences with Pyro robotics and Igraph soon.

Monday, March 3, 2008

Incredible Video of intracellular molecular dynamics

I just found this incredible video (animation) depicting what goes on continually within our own cells. Reminds me of why I became a biologist.
We should never cease to let ourselves be amazed by the great machine that is the living cell and the organisms they are part of. Enjoy!

ccp

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