Many scientists spend much of their time writing, debugging, and maintaining software. But while techniques for doing this efficiently have been developed, only few scientists actually use them. As a result, they spend far too much time writing deficient code and reinventing the wheel instead of doing research. In this course we present a selection of advanced programming techniques with theoretical lectures and practical exercises tailored to the needs of the programming scientist. To spice up theory and foster our new skills in a real-world programming project, we will team up to develop an entertaining scientific computer game.

We will use the Python programming language for the entire course. With a large collection of open-source scientific modules and all features of a full-fledged programming language, Python is rapidly gaining popularity in the neuroscience community. It enables the scientist to quickly develop powerful, efficient, and structured software and is becoming an essential tool for scientific computing.

The summer school is targeted at Post-docs and PhD students from all areas of neuroscience. Substantial proficiency in Python or in another language (e.g. Java, C/C++, MATLAB, Mathematica) is absolutely required. An optional, one-day pre-course is offered to participants without Python experience to familiarize with the language.

Organizers: Michael Schmuker and Tiziano Zito

Faculty members: Pietro Berkes, Jens Kremkow, Eilif Muller, Michael Schmuker, Bartosz Telenczuk, Niko Wilbert, and Tiziano Zito

Crew: Valentin Haenel and Rike Schuppner

Get the official announcement.

The summer school will take place in Berlin, Germany, from August 31 to September 4. On “Day0”, i.e. August 31 a Python crash course will be offered for Python beginners. Attendance to “Day0” is optional. Have a look at Location for a detailed description of the school venue and some hints about accomodation and traveling in Berlin.

Some pictures taken during the courses

• Day 0 - Dive Into Python
• Day 1 - Software carpentry, Object Oriented Programming, and Design Patterns
• Day 2 - Scientific tools for Python
• Day 3 - Parallelization
• Day 4 - Practical software development

Detailed schedule and course material

Download all course materials, exercises, solutions, demos, and PacMan code: superpack.zip

Starting from “Day2” students will auto-organize 5 groups to do team-work on the programming project. As announced, you are going to do some programming for a video game .

Introduction to the PacMan contest

Project description

Testing agents

Example agents

Tournament

Groups

Tutors' agents

Tutors' tournament

We prepared a page about faculty members and their special skills.

• WiFi Internet Access: from Aug 28 to Sep 4, 7:00→23:00. SSID: “SommerUni”, WPA-Key: “Summer2oo9”
• Software & Tools: Live System
• Servers:
  • Subversion: https://portal.bccn-berlin.de/svn/python-summerschool/public
  • Subversion Repositories Browsing: SVN server Browsing
  • Wiki: https://portal.bccn-berlin.de/pythonss

Python Code in LaTeX Don't forget to join our official Facebook group!!!

The evaluation survey has been completed by 29 out of 30 students.

We are really happy that you enjoyed the school so much, and hope to give you an even better experience next time .

Have a look at the results.

• Simply excellent, very easy to follow and of an extraordinary practical value for the scientist daily programming work!!!! [Jose Guzman]