Topics

• Getting Off the Struggle Bus: Learning From Transit Data
  By: Spencer Chan
  Experience Level: Novice
  Length: 20 Minutes
  Description:

  In an extended version of the lightning talk I gave for the spring ChiPy mentorship final presentations, I will go into more depth about how I collected and processed bus location data from the CTA's bus tracker API. I will also discuss interesting discoveries I made once I plotted the data, work I have done on the project since completing the mentorship (collecting data from 30 additional bus routes, converting visualizations from Bokeh/Python to D3.js, analyzing and visualizing bus bunching, etc), as well as future plans for the project.

• Storm surge: hurricane flooding simulation using Python, Fortran, and GeoClaw
  By: Marc Kjerland
  Length: 25 Minutes
  Description:

  The 2017 hurricane season is proving to be one of the strongest in history, and predictive modeling plays an important role in evacuation and mitigation planning. Coastal communities in the path of hurricanes face several major hazards - strong winds, heavy rainfall, relentless waves, and storm surge. Storm surge is a type of transient sea level rise where water is forced towards the shore by winds, and the right conditions can produce very high levels - Hurricane Harvey raised Galveston Bay by upwards of ten feet, and in 2012 Hurricane Sandy produced 12-foot surge in Lower Manhattan. I'll discuss the current state of storm surge modeling with focus on an open-source package called GeoClaw, developed by academic researchers across the U.S. GeoClaw uses Python and Fortran to run a dynamic simulation of coastal flooding using storm and topography datasets, and thanks to some novel dimensionality reduction it can be run on a laptop.

• Anaconda: The Best of Everything in PyData
  By: Patrick Boland
  Experience Level: Intermediate
  Length: 25 Minutes
  Description:

  A continued narrative of the tale of two snakes. In this talk, we will discuss some of the most impressive features of Anaconda, including built in binaries, command line interface, the history of the distribution, and why it is the right choice for just about every Python stack. This talk does not assume audience familiarity with the distribution. We will take advantage of the *better* batteries included nature of this distribution to step through beginner and intermediate concepts. I intend for the audience to feel comfortable and excited to give this a try on their own.