💬 OR Tech Seminar: outline

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This is an overview page for “OR Tech Seminar” organized with support from Clemson INFORMS Student Chapter. The core discussion (Mondays, 10-00 AM EST) is finished, unless we decide there are more topics we would like to talk about.

Some more notes will be posted here soon. (Clemson login is required to access the recordings.) Comments and suggestions are very welcome – both on past and possible future seminars.

The format

We will be discussing various tools (in a very broad sense) we, as researchers, use – to share experience, configs, and ideas. Each seminar will consist of a speaker presentation with a discussion along the way, at most one hour in total.

Core discussion

  1. 📰 Working with the literature: tools and approaches. (2021-01-25)  Summary 
    • Managing references (Zotero, JabRef, Mendeley and friends).
    • Using the literature: latex/bibtex, editors, etc. (very brief)
    • Discovering the literature (feeds, mailing lists, etc.)
    • A note on notes.
  2. 🔀 Version-control: a quick intro to Git. (2021-02-01)  Summary 
    • Version control, backups, when to use (always!)
    • Git, github, and the team.
    • Repositories (remote, local). Create, fork, clone, and other spells.
    • Keeping track of your code/text: add, commit, push/pull.
    • Workflow / branches – checkout, merge, rebasing, conflicts.
  3. 🌧 (Cloud) The Command Line. (Two seminars: 2021-02-08 and 2021-02-15) Notes on the cluster / working in the shell:
    • logging in / comp nodes vs. login shell, a note on file systems.
    • Moving things between remote and local machines (scp, rsync, github, etc.).
    • Shell-related basics (moving around, editing, installing things, etc.).
    • Running things: commands, aliases, pipes, stdout/stderr, scripts, access rights (chmod). Very intro bash scripting.
    • Some utils (tar, head, tail, split, shuf, etc.)
    • Running jobs on the cluster: PBS basics; modules.
    • Running things in parallel (a quick GNU parallel demo, etc.).
    • Possibly, Makefiles.

Additional topics (work in progress)

  1. 💻 Introductory materials on Python:
    • Syntax basics / learning resources.
    • Versions, environments, managing packages (conda, pip)
    • Jupyter notebooks (extracting code, presenting, exporting, JupyterHub, etc. A word on alternatives)
    • Optimization in Python (with Gurobi solver and gurobipy) – a quick example.
    • A word on scripting in Python (maybe a quick example).
    • Further reading.
  2. 💻 Selected materials on Julia. Note: we have a collection of materials on different topics related to Julia from the previous year seminars by Murwan Siddig – see his Julia tutorials repo.
  3. 👓 Selected topics on programming.
    • Speeding up code in Python: special libraries, loops, vectorized computations, map, etc.
    • “Profiling” python code (“what’s so slow?")
    • … and in Julia: very brief notes on parallel computations and precompiling.