Julia - A fresh approach to numerical computing and data science

Abstract:  Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing. It provides a sophisticated compiler that leverages LLVM, distributed parallel execution, a focus on numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. Julia’s Base library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed open source C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing. Julia is already the language of choice for numerical computing in many of the best universities around the world. Many of Julia’s core developers are based out of Bangalore.

This talk will focus on the journey of Julia, language design, and what makes Julia fast.

Bio: Viral Shah is co-creator of Julia. Julia is a modern and easy to use high performance programming language. While it is an open source project with a diverse community of almost 500 contributors around the world, research on Julia is anchored at MIT. Today, the Julia community counts close to 500 contributors and is racing towards 1000 open source packages. It is being used by a number of universities for teaching and research, and by businesses in areas as diverse as engineering, finance, and e-commerce, to name a few.

Apart from Julia, he is also co-creator of Circuitscape, which is a free, open-source program which borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict patterns of movement, gene flow, and genetic differentiation among plant and animal populations in heterogeneous landscapes. He has a Ph. D. from University of California at Santa Barbara, in Computer Science, with  Emphasis on Computational Sciences and Engineering.