Main goals
The event was organized as a satellite event of the yearly international conference in algebraic combinatorics FPSAC. The objective was to gather the combinatorics community around Sage development, to introduce Sage to newcomers (especially graduate students) and to bring new Sage contributions.
OpenDreamKit implication
the event was co-organized by OpenDreamKit (through Viviane Pons) and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Science where it was hosted. The event costed around 4000 CAD (2000 CAD from OpenDreamKit). A short presentation about OpenDreamKit was made during the conference to present the project to the participants.
Event summary
We started the event by some introduction presentations and tutorials so that the participants would familiarize themselves with Sage. Then the time was shared between lectures and coding sprints. Here are some highlights:
- Our invited speaker ## Mike Zabrock
(York Univ.) gave a lecture on Open Problems in Combinatorial Representation Theory.
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Emily Gunawa
(Univ. of Minnesota) and ## Jessica Strike
(North Dakota State Univ.) gave respectively a tutorial and a lecture on Research-based coding for Sage.
- An undergrad student ## Amit Jamadagn
gave a presentation of the extensive package on Knot Theory that he developed during a Google Summer of code project.
The full program can be found on the href{https://wiki.sagemath.org/days78}{website}. We planned lots of time for participants to work on development projects such as: Plane partitions, plotting functions for combinatorics objects, Lie algebras, Rook placements, …
Demographic
The participants were required to fill out a demographic survey. We had 29 participants (24 males and 5 females), 27 identified as academics: 7 professors, 6 postdoc, 11 graduate students, and 3 undergrads. 19 participants were from North America (10 from Canada and 9 from the US), 8 were from Europe (France, Austria, and Switzerland), and 3 from Asia (South Korea and India).
Results and impact
- Newcomers got to use Sage for the first time around one third of the participants had zero or very little experience with Sage before the meeting. By the end of the three days, everyone had a way to use Sage (either online or on their machines) and had written a bit of code.
- Newcomers got to contribute to Sage a lecture was given on how to contribute to Sage and groups were formed on different projects mixing more experienced people with newcomers so that the code that was written could end up being merged to the software. In particular, a implementation of Plane Partitions was put together by a participant who had never used Sage before.
- New contributions were made in the combinatorics component of Sage we used the keyword days7 on the trac server of Sage to track the contributions that were submitted during the workshop. Altogether the participants worked on 17 different tickets either reviewing existing ticket, implementing, or creating new tickets. 6 of them already got positive reviews and are on the process of being merged to the software.
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Participants of Sage Days 78 making Sage demo