An invitation to JuliaCon 2016

08 May 2016  |  The JuliaCon organisers

For the third year in row we are happy to invite you to JuliaCon, the annual meeting of the Julia programming language community. JuliaCon 2016 will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from June 21st to 25th and as a first, this year we will have several high-profile keynote speakers, as well as the top-notch tutorials and talks you have come to expect over the years. Please purchase your tickets before May 13th to take advantage of the early-bird pricing and we look forward to seeing you in June!

JuliaCon, just like the Julia language, has come a long way over the last three years. In 2014 we were roughly 75 attendees meeting in a medium-sized conference room at the University of Chicago to great success, in 2015 we had about 225 attendees and enough content to cover four full days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and this year we hope that you will join us for the greatest JuliaCon yet!

From June 21st to the 25th JuliaCon 2016 will be held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for a full five days of Julia-related content. On Tuesday 21st we will hold several workshops, on topics ranging from intermediate Julia programming to more advanced topics such as writing high-performance and parallel programming. From Wednesday 22nd to Friday 24th we will start each day with a keynote by a high-profile speaker, followed by talks on a great variety of subjects: macro economics, machine learning, astrophysics, visualisation, and more! On Saturday 25th, the final day of the conference, we will hold a hackathon where attendees are encouraged to team up based on personal interests to either create new Julia projects or contribute to existing ones. All these details are now in the JuliaCon poster.

Without further ado, please allow us to introduce our keynote speakers:

• Timothy E. Holy is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2009 he received the NIH Director’s Pioneer award for innovations in optics and microscopy. His lab, which studies how the brain detects pheromones and develops new optical methods for imaging neuronal activity, was one of the first to adopt Julia for scientific research. He is a long time Julia contributor and a lead developer of Julia’s multidimensional array capabilities as well as the author of far too many Julia packages.
• Thomas J. Sargent is a Professor of Economics at New York University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2011 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on macroeconomics. Together with John Stachurski, he founded quant-econ.net, a Julia and Python based learning platform for quantitative economics focusing on algorithms and numerical methods for studying economic problems as well as coding skills.
• Guy L. Steele, Jr. is a Software Architect for Oracle Labs and Principal Investigator of the Programming Language Research project. In 1994, he was made a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery after receiving the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1988. He is an experienced designer of programming languages, like Scheme, Fortress and Java, and many of his ideas have had an impact on the design of Julia.

We hope that our invitation entices you to join us – new, intermediate, and experienced Julia users – for five days of fun at MIT this June and remember to purchase your tickets before May 13th to receive a 33% early-bird discount!

We need your help to spread this message far and wide! Post the JuliaCon poster and this blog post to your local email lists. Print the poster and post it on your local message board. In addition, please tweet, retweet, post on FaceBook and LinkedIn and other social media. This is the biggest JuliaCon ever, and we need your help in making it a huge success.