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Julia – The Future of Numerical Computing and Data Science

First things first, we are really excited to announce our first JuliaCon India at Bangalore on Oct 9th and 10th. Julia Computing has partnered with Hasgeek for this event. For details and for registration, please visit http://www.juliacon.in/2015.

JuliaConJulia is the future of data science and analytics. Julia is open source, and its research and development have been anchored at MIT since 2009. Julia can easily be orders of magnitude faster than comparable solutions in interpreted dynamic languages such as R and Python, and is almost as fast as C (see http://julialang.org/benchmarks/). This makes it possible to deploy Julia in production.

Valentine’s day of 2012 was a special day for Julia. Our Why Julia blog post went viral and the Julia website has since been visited by over a million people. Today, Julia is a vibrant community with over 400 contributors. Over 700 packages are available in Julia today, in addition to the thousands of other open source packages in R and Python that can also be called from Julia.

Based on hundreds of discussions with CXO level leaders worldwide over the last 12 months or so, we now have deep insights into the nature of technical and business problems that enterprises are grappling with, and how Julia is already playing a key role in helping solve such problems.

Many companies depend on cutting edge computing technologies to create a market differentiator. Over the years, such companies would have developed in-house languages and/or databases or other technologies that they use to create their business solutions. Examples of such companies are large and small financial services firms on Wall Street, banks, investment banks, hedge funds and others who use such technologies in their trading platforms, asset management, risk management, portfolio management and other kinds of applications. Other examples of such firms are e-commerce companies that need pricing algorithms, search algorithms, and other compute intensive code that uses large amounts of data and complex algorithms. Such companies have either started looking at or started using Julia for their next generation platforms.

Similarly, CIOs’ offices in large enterprises in retail, distribution, telecom, manufacturing and many other verticals wrangle with high performance data analytics using their big data stacks. Julia is an ideal computational companion for such big data analytics applications.

CTOs’ organizations that undertake product design in engineering firms that are using tools in computer aided engineering, CAD, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics and other kinds of simulations are looking at Julia to replace the older mathematical computation packages that are slow, unwieldy and expensive. Examples of such organizations are found in automotive, aerospace, government labs, space research, and many others.

Regulators around the world are increasingly worrying about safety. Financial regulators want algorithms that are auditable and don’t crash markets. Regulators who keep our cars and planes safe and our environment clean are increasingly worried about the software that runs on these devices. Health regulators want devices that monitor our health to have reliable software. Regulators worldwide are now thinking about open source as the only viable approach to safety. Languages such as Julia that are mathematically sound and safe, make it easier for businesses to write software and for regulators to inspect it. We invite the reader to watch this fascinating video on the use of Julia in avionics.

In the nascent world of the Internet of Things, Julia provides a common language for analytics on the device and the server where algorithms can seamlessly and automatically move back and forth, given the constraints of bandwidth, power, and processing. Do see this video on the use of Julia in 3d printing.

Julia Computing, Inc. is a company formed by all the creators of Julia. Julia Computing provides professional development and deployment tools for Julia, consisting of open source as well as proprietary components. Our customers love having a common language for development and deployment of analytics solutions. Their gains are easily quantified by the elimination of program rewrites for deployment, and the significantly faster time to market.

Again, we are really excited to announce our first JuliaCon India at Bangalore on Oct 9th and 10th. Julia Computing has partnered with hasgeek for this event. For details and for registration, please visit http://www.juliacon.in/2015.

Guest Post by Viral Shah & Deepak Vinchhi for Julia Computing.

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HasGeek announces Meta Refresh and Rootconf 2015

HasGeek is a community of geeks that gets together several times a year to discuss technology relevant to product startups. HasGeek’s conferences are community driven via an open submission and selection process through Talkfunnel.

Product startups spanning the spectrum from Flipkart to Freecharge and SupportBee to Qubole are a recurring feature at HasGeek conferences, where they come to share candidly and compare notes on how their technology works.

Our next conference is Meta Refresh (April 16-17), on building stellar web-based interfaces, and this year’s edition takes a serious look at the mobile web, an area that remains significant despite the growth of native apps, whether for the initial acquisition of a user or a full transaction cycle. A sizeable portion of your existing user base could be accessing your website only through a handheld device. It is quite likely that future web users will never experience a site on a large screen. We’re looking at proposals from the community that address the evolution of mobile web design, content design for mobile websites, as well as best practices for mobile web UX.

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Meta Refresh is followed by Rootconf (May 15-16), on DevOps, cloud infrastructure and operational reliability, from development to production. Operational excellence is primarily about learning from experience and tactical improvising, but achieving it isn’t easy. We’re trying to address issues pertaining to continuous integration, deployment, testing and delivery strategy as well as team dynamics, which come up in the process. To that end, we’re inviting proposals about infrastructure scaling and automation, CI/CD strategies, microservice patterns, code security, server vulnerabilities, logging and server monitoring, as well as LXC technologies, and Docker adoption strategies.

The funnels for Meta Refresh and Rootconf have full instructions on focus areas and the selection process.

In addition to the main conferences in Bangalore, Meta Refresh and Rootconf also have mini editions in cities across India. The current planned editions are in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kochi. Details on the Meta Refresh talkfunnel.

Guest Post by Rudi MK, HasGeek

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Online Survey for Indian Mobile App Developer Enterprises

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) recently released an online survey for mobile app developers to respond on their legal practices within their work, as well as their business models and familiarity with India’s laws. Through this research initiative, CIS hopes to better understand the dynamics of India’s mobile app ecosystem amongst stakeholders, and how developers are directly or indirectly affected by the laws in place governing this ecosystem.

survey-buttonDevelopers, designers, and product managers of all sorts are invited to participate within CIS’s research survey initiative so long as they are based in India and contribute to the development of at least one mobile application within a company or enterprise. Built in collaboration with HasGeek, a community-oriented enterprise for developers in Bangalore, the survey asks participants to respond to questions on their practices related to ownership, licensing, contracts and protection of their works as intellectual property (IP). Questions also seek out background information and information related to one’s business model to best contextualize responses, as well as personal insight on understandings of India’s copyright laws and IP more generally.

The survey can be accessed here, and will be available for completion until Tuesday, April 29, 2014.

Ultimately, CIS intends to comment on whether the current laws in place related to intellectual property are a causal factor in either encouraging or hindering mobile app development in India. In this sense, this initiative serves as preliminary policy research and strives to provide a comprehensive understanding on the widespread legal practices of developers as the supporting stakeholders of this mobile app ecosystem.

By the end of this survey’s running, we hope to be able to better illustrate the complexities within an ever-growing ecosystem that are typically only considered at a level of technical or legal abstraction. For instance, it is quite common for discourse to reference the specific activities that developers might undergo while potentially violating another’s rights to their works, such as those involving the direct copying of software code without the permission to do so. Other sources might advocate for the patenting of one’s mobile app products and entail the complexities of the patent filing process to ensure the optimal likelihood of the application being granted.

But what are the trends that exist across developers related to such activities? What are the ways in which they carry out these activities, and most importantly, why?

What determines who patents their product or copies another’s? And what factors are at play in the shaping of an enterprise’s business model and the methods that they adopt to meet their objectives?

What barriers do enterprises encounter along the way, from the startup to the corporate, and how do they get around them accordingly?

We hope that through this online survey, CIS will begin to be able to address these areas of greyed understanding, and to identify existing correlation, if any, between the business models, legal practices and personal understandings related to IP, and how one’s work within mobile app development is affected as a result.

Guest Post by Samantha Cassar, Centre for Internet & Society

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Fireflies lighting up the sky

Some years ago, Infosys and Wipro put Bangalore on the global map. Now, Bangalore is once again marching ahead. It is creating a new kind of technology ecosystem, which is culturally different from what exists today.

Today’s tech-ecosystem is about a few ‘hathi’ firms doing IT Services. Metaphorically, this is about manicured lawns, straight rows of carefully planted flowers and an occasional oak tree. In contrast, the new ecosystem is about hundreds, nay thousands, of small tech product startups. It evokes the image of a vibrant forest with fast running streams, wild flowers and bamboo shoots. If you think of the current ecosystem as a cathedral, then the new one is a bazaar.

Behind the cacophony of the new tech ecosystem are two powerful trends. The first one is about Software as a Service (SaaS). Gone are the days of buying big servers, expensive software licences and bulky implementation services. Increasingly, business software is just rented and used by employees much the same way you and I use Yahoo mail. This seemingly small shift has momentous implications.

Since a software company doesn’t need an army to sell and deploy its business application anymore, size is not an asset; focus is. So a plethora of small single-minded startups have emerged. And some of them like Zoho, InMobi and Fusion Charts are making waves around the world.

The best days are still to come. SaaS is spreading like wildfire. Doctors’ offices are using it for less than a price of a Café Coffee Day latte. Apartment complexes are using ‘ERP’ type SaaS business software for Rs15 per apartment per month. Lots of small companies in Peenya and Okhla are using world-class payroll and leave management SaaS business software for Rs10 per employee per month.

Basically, SaaS is going into nooks and crannies where no business software has gone before. Just like mobile phones brought telephony to the masses, SaaS is bringing useful business applications to all SMBs. Indian startups are at the forefront of this emerging revolution.

Complementing this SaaS trend is a grassroots movement for strengthening the tech ecosystem. Gone are the trade bodies; in its place have come in volunteer-driven think tanks and communities like iSPIRT and HasGeek. Much like the Aam Aadmi Party, they use bottoms-up participation to fuel a collective process of creating public goods that everybody consumes.

Entrepreneurs help other entrepreneurs by putting their winning (and even losing) playbooks in the public domain. All this is inspired by the amazing success of the open-source movement that created Linux and Wikipedia. Based on all this, a new glow is visible. Look out for the fireflies lighting up the sky.