Progress report for Oxford
Dima Pasechnik
Reporting period from March 2017 to January 2018
Finance and administration
There is a small underspend on the budget in Oxford, around 25K euro, which ought to be used: the most reasonable way would be to top up the salary for Pasechnik, the only paid person on the project at Oxford.
Hiring
Since Sept. 2017 Pasechnik is employed for 50% FTE on the project (down from 100% from March until August 2017), due to the original budget setup of ODK. More funds are being sought (Pasechnik has a teaching load for around 20% of FTE).
Achievements
In the reporting period most work in Oxford has been towards portability of Sage and its components, with patches contributed to MPIR, MPFR, Singular, GAP, PPL, Flint, Arb, Scipy, as well as Sage itself. Most time was devoted to porting to clang (very important for support of Sage on OSX).
Pasechnik co-mentored two Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students in the summer of 2017, which resulted in fixing long-standing stopgaps in the graph theory component of Sage.
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Work in progress
Ports of Sage to FreeBSD and Solaris, which have been abandoned and allowed to bitrot, have been revived, and are well underway.
Pasechnik is an admin and a prospective mentor for Sage’s GSoC 2018 effort.
Workshops and dissemination activities
Pasechnik attended a number of ODK and ODK-related workshops and meetings, including meetings in Brussels and in Kaiserslautern. He helped with using Sage in teaching at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute.
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Other
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