People Network Calls in November; End-of-Year Party in December

Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network virtual meetings. (For handy calendar entries, try the CaRCC Events Calendar.)

CaRCC End-Of-Year Party (Save the date!)

Thursday, December 10, 1-2:30pm ET / 12-1:30pm CT / 11am-12:30pm MT / 10-11:30am PT

We’ll use Zoom’s new support for self-select breakout rooms, with rooms designated for several topics, including opportunities to learn about and get involved with CaRCC Working Groups and People Network engagement, and a room for an SC20 ‘after-party’ discussion. Make sure you’ve recently updated your Zoom client (to version 5.3.0 or higher) to take full advantage.

Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)

Tuesday, November 3, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Teaching Data Skills Remotely: Check-in

This month is a check-in discussion about teaching research data skills remotely 6+ months into the effort.  What have you learned about teaching R, Python, SQL, and other data programming languages and skills online?  What resources (technical and people) are required to be successful?  What have you changed from your initial efforts?  How have your experiences influenced your thinking about workshops and training for the future?  What training do you provide other than live workshops?  Any experiments in remote formats?  We’ll have a panel of folks willing to briefly share their experiences, but there will also be an open discussion time to share ideas and resources and ask questions.

Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)

Thursday, November 12, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT

Profiling and Optimizing R Code in your Workflows

A majority of researchers and data science professionals are working with a few languages, with R among them. Known for its broad use in statistics, beautiful plotting capabilities, and rich code contributions to CRAN, most know it is not the most performant language, esp. if one is not writing idiomatic R code or writing in traditional language constructs. Add to this mix self-taught programmer-researchers and increasingly larger data sets… you have arrived at your need to improve the execution time of one’s code. We’ll spend this session discussing how one finds oneself in this predicament and what are some of the solutions, including profiling to understand bottlenecks and optimizing code, to name a few.

Presenters: Katia Bulekova, Manager of Scientific Programming and Applications, Information Services & Technology, Boston University; et al. Seeking 1-2 more presenters. If interested, e-mail Katia (ktrn@bu.edu) 

Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)

No regularly scheduled call in November or December due to SC20 and winter break conflicts. Make sure to join the End-of-Year Party on December 10! (see above) 

Next track call will be in January.

Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)

No regularly scheduled call in November or December due to SC20 and winter break conflicts. Make sure to join the End-of-Year Party on December 10! (see above)

Next track call will be in January.

Interested members of the People Network need not subscribe to a particular track to participate in calls. Additional details for track members, including notes documents and any pre-call activities, will be distributed ahead of the call via the email lists and other communication channels within each track.

The CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) People Network, aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the “People Network”) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you have received this email NOT via CaRCC’s People Network, and you would like to join the People Network, which includes Researcher-facing, Data-facing, Systems-facing, and other tracks, please fill in the form at http://bit.ly/join_carcc_people_network.

All calls will take place within the same Zoom room distributed via email. Please join the People Network (link just above) or contact help@carcc.org for details.