Outreach

Public Speaking

How Star Trek Inspired a Generation of Scientists
Academia Film Olomouc

Invited keynote lecture at Academia Film Olomouc, an international science documentary film festival in Olomouc, Czech Republic. In this lecture, Dr. Iacovino talks about how a television show from the 1960s inspired a generation of people to become explorers. The festival is held each April under the patronage of Palacký University and focuses on science and educational films from the fields of humanities, natural science and social science, as well as current scientific, artistic and technological advances.

Life After matplotlib: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
PyData London 2014

AvoPlot is a simple graphical plotting program created by scientists, for scientists. Born out of the frustrations of a multi-disciplinary research group working in the lab, the field and a desk, it aims to solve some of the greatest remaining problems in scientific data handling, such as: * “I hate programming! I wish I could create an interactive plot of this data file without having to write a script.” * “This plot that matplotlib created is beautiful! But I wish I could just click and drag that title a bit to the left”. * “I have this great bit of data processing code and I’d like to make it available as a graphical application, but I have neither the time nor the programming ability to do so.” * “Spreadsheets suck! I want to work with my data in a visual way, rather than having to deal with tables of numbers.” Built on top of Python’s excellent matplotlib plotting library, AvoPlot is a graphical plotting tool designed for visualising and analysing scientific data. In addition to providing a graphical user interface to many of the capabilities of matplotlib, it also provides a plug-in framework, allowing users to extend its standard feature set to meet their specific requirements. Plug-ins can be written both to import different data sets (e.g. binary data), and to provide analysis tools for working with them (e.g. fitting routines, background subtraction etc.). This talk will take a light-hearted look at some of the data handling problems encountered by scientists, and explain how we have brought together the capabilities of many well established Python packages into a single convenient application in an attempt to solve them.