OctConf 2013
Following the success of OctConf 2012 which brought together users and developers for five days in July in the French Canadian summer, the first european OctConf was be held in Milan, Italy on June 24-26 2013.
OctConf is a good opportunity to meet Octave developers and users from all over the world and discuss current and future directions of the Octave project.
Summary of activities
Opening keynote speaker: John W. Eaton
John (aka, jwe) gave us another update on GNU Octave's development in the last year. Things look good for Octave but we still need to improve the flow from users to contributors. The optimal way would be to get more core developers (i.e. people who update and improve the core of Octave's) however users can contribute in many ways, some ideas follow:
- Helping with the Wiki.
- Commenting on bugs/features in tracker.
- Maintaining/updating/contributing packages to Octave-Forge.
- Organizing events (talks, courses, etc.).
- Donating.
Finally, we discussed a lot about economic sustainability of the project. How can people make money using GNU Octave without damaging/endangering its freedom? Do you know business models that could fit? How can we organize a pool of developers to offer support for companies wanting to use GNU Octave?
Teaching engineers with GNU Octave
Andreas Stahel from Biel, Switzerland gave a talk about teaching GNU Octave for Engineering. All his material (code, lecture notes, etc) is available for download, reuse, remix, reshare.
FEM mash-up and Octave
S. Schöps showed a mash-up of proprietary and libre (FOSS) software to solve 3D coupled electromagnetic problems.
New sparse matrices for Octave
Michele Martone presented his (future) Octave package for sparse matrix using recursive blocks (quad-tree blockification of matrices). He is very willing to collaborate with any development that could use his code.
Hardware and Octave
The Octave-Forge Instrument control package allows to interface Octave with hardware. Juan Pablo Carbajal gave a very short demo on how to do serial communication with the Dwengo board. Here are the details, watch the video.
Location
Hosting Institution and Local Sponsors
OctConf 2013 was hosted by the MOX Modeling and Scientific Computing lab at the Department of Mathematics of Milan Technical University (Politecnico di Milano), and was partially supported by MOXOFF.
Venue
The meeting was held on the 7th floor of Building 14 ("La Nave") of the "Leonardo" campus of Politecnico di Milano in the Department meeting room.
Milano, Italy
Milan is one of the most art and history rich cities in Italy, and it is within 100 miles of all the most beautiful locations in northern Italy including the Alps, the Mediterranean Sea and the lake region. With new high speed train connections it is also about 2 and a half hours away from Rome. There are 3 international airports in Milan all served by Low-Cost companies that offer cheap flights to/from most cities in Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
Summer in Milano can be quite hot and humid but rain is very rare. The city has a very serviceable public transportation network of buses and underground trains (metro), there is also a public bike rental service but none of the bike rental stations is located conveniently enough to serve the Politecnico campus at this time yet.
How to get there
The reference is:
MOX - Modeling and Scientific Computing
Dipartimento di Matematica "F. Brioschi"
Politecnico di Milano
via Bonardi 9
Edificio 14 ("La Nave")
See this page on the MOX website for directions, or check out this link on Google maps.
Lodging
See this page for lodging opportunities in the vicinity of the Politecnico Leonardo campus.
Dates
June 24-26, 2013. Each day will be focusing on a specific topic
- Day 1 : Octave in Education
- Day 2 : Octave in Academic Research
- Day 3 : Octave in Engineering Applications
Detailed Schedule
| Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | |
| 09:15 | Coffee & croissants | Coffee & croissants | Coffee & croissants |
| 09:30 | Talk — TBA | Talk — TBA | Talk — TBA |
| 10:15 | Talk — TBA | Talk — TBA | Talk — TBA |
| 11:00 | Coffee break | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 11:15 | Open discussion | Open discussion | Open discussion |
| 13:15 | Lunch | Lunch | Lunch |
| 14:30 | Tutorial 1: TBA | Tutorial 2: TBA | Tutorial 3: TBA |
| 15:45 | Coffee break | Coffee break | Coffee break |
| 16:00 | Code sprints | Code sprints | Code sprints |
| 17:30 | Status reports | Status reports | Status reports |
| 18:00 | Social event |
Participants
The registration procedure has now been moved here The complete list of participants will be published here after the conference.
Octave developers attending
Note: putting your name down in this list is not a valid form of registration. This is only to announce others that you'll be attending.
Funding
There is limited funding to cover the travel expenses of selected participants.