SciPy 2010 coming to Austin, TX (6/28 - 7/4)

Mark your calendar!  The 2010 SciPy Conference will be held in Austin, Texas from Monday, June 28th to Sunday, July 4th.  We are still in the early planning stages, but expect to have two days of tutorials, two days of conference, and three days of sprints:

  Tutorials        Monday (6/28) - Tuesday (6/29)
  Conference    Wednesday (6/30) - Thursday (7/1)
  Sprints           Friday (7/2) - Sunday (7/4)

From 2001 to 2009, the SciPy conference was held at Caltech with the generous support of the Center for Advanced Computing Research.  This year we've decided start holding the conference at rotating locations to ensure more people will get the opportunity to attend the conference.  Since the initial conference in 2001, the scientific computing in Python community has rapidly grown.  In addition to the main SciPy conference, we now have dedicated SciPy conferences in both Europe and India.  Moreover, there are an increasing number of non-SciPy conferences with dedicated sessions on scientific computing with Python.  For example, the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE09) had a three-part minisymposium on Python for Scientific Computing.

This year we will also hold the conference earlier in the summer than in previous years--moving from the end of August to the end of June.  Holding the conference at the end of August meant that the conference coincided with the start of the spring semester for many attendees, which caused some scheduling conflicts.  Having the conference in late August also made it difficult to get a quick turn around on publishing our post-conference proceedings since most of the authors and reviewers had to focus on the beginning of the academic year.

We are also extending the post-conference sprint from two days to three.  Our post-conference sprints have been increasingly successful and we hope that by extending the sprint we will be able to get a lot more done.  We are also hoping that by moving the conference to earlier in the summer will give us more time to finish work started during the sprint before the fall semester.  For example, this year David Warde-Farley and I worked on migrating the SciPy homepage from a MoinMoin wiki to a Sphinx site.  During the sprint we made significant progress on the new site, but stopped short of being able to actually deploy it.  Both David and I haven't had time to finish our work due to the academic semester starting immediately after the conference.  The changes to the conference dates will hopefully increase our success in getting bigger projects, which are started during the sprint, finalized before the start of semester.  (Work is slowly progressing on the new site and I hope to switch to the new site in December, during the SciPy India 2009 sprint.)

And if you stay for the entire sprint, you will get to be part of a Texas-sized celebration of the fourth of July.  I was able to witness the festivities myself two years ago during the 2008 Mayavi sprint.  While some people may not be able to attend the sprint because of its overlap with the fourth of July celebration, these dates were our best options given all our constraints.  This summer is going to be a very busy one for the SciPy community.  There are at least two other SciPy-related events going on during the same time as our conference.  Sage Days 22 on elliptic curves will be held in Berkeley from June 21st to July 2nd, which unfortunately means that few Sage developers will be able to attend SciPy 2010.  And the 2nd European Seminar of Coupled Problems (ESCO) will be held June 28th to July 2nd in the Czech Republic.  It will feature a track on next generation scientific computing with a focus on Python.  While it is great to see scientific computing with Python being presented in more and more venues, this particular conference means that Gaël Varoquaux will most likely not be attending the 2010 SciPy conference.  As the program chair for both SciPy 2008 and SciPy 2009, Gaël has been essential to the success of the last two SciPy conferences.

Austin is called the "Silicon Hills" due to the large number of technology corporations located there and it advertises itself as the live music capital of the world.  Almost every establishment provides live music every evening.  Restaurants offer a wide variety of interesting fare with a focus on BBQ and Mexican Food.  If you need some exercise, the river that runs through the downtown area has a very well-used running path, and the hill country surrounding Austin has many hiking and biking trails.  And most importantly, Austin is home to Enthought.  Enthought is the main sponsor of both the SciPy project and the conference.

I am looking forward to the SciPy 2010 conference and hope to see many of you there.  If you are interested in helping out with the program committee, please send me an email.  I would also like to continue and expand the student travel funding, so if you are interested in sponsoring students to attend the conference, please contact me.  I will be posting more information regarding the venue and timeline in January (after I finish organizing the SciPy India conference).