Using DesignSafe’s JupyterHub and Python for Natural Hazards Research | April 14, 2022

About the Webinar

This two-hour webinar will cover an overview of DesignSafe’s JupyterHub (20 minutes), a brief introduction to Python programming (40 minutes), a discussion of more-advanced topics in Python (30 minutes), and a dedicated hands-on segment where attendees can work on their own or provided example problems and ask questions (30 minutes). The goal of the webinar is to provide support for prospective and new users of Python and DesignSafe’s JupyterHub, as well as detail new recently released features for environment management, scientific reproducibility, and portability for more advanced users.

While the webinar will focus primarily on Python syntax, the webinar will also include a brief demonstration of how attendees can also use the R and Julia programming languages on DesignSafe. While we encourage attendance throughout, the webinar will be kept to the schedule detailed above to allow attendees to select the segments of the webinar that are of the greatest interest to them.

Attendees are strongly encouraged to bring their own research-related problems and questions to the final hands-on segment, and to use this opportunity to accelerate their natural-hazards-related research using DesignSafe.

Presenter

Joseph Vantassel grew up in a small town in western Massachusetts. For his undergraduate studies, he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, focusing on the areas of geotechnical engineering, geology, and structural engineering, and earning his B.S. in Civil Engineering in 2016. During his undergraduate studies, Joseph held a number of professional appointments including construction inspector at the Massachusetts’s Department of Transportation, project engineer at Schnabel Foundation Company, and undergraduate researcher at Rensselaer’s Geotechnical Centrifuge. For his graduate studies, Joseph attended The University of Texas at Austin, earning his M.S. in May of 2018 and Ph.D. in December of 2021. His graduate studies focused heavily on the intersection of geotechnical engineering, geophysics, and computer science, in particular the areas of signal processing and the solution of inverse problems.

During his graduate studies Joseph developed several popular open-source Python packages including hvsrpy that has been downloaded over 20k times since its release in February of 2020 and is currently being used in the US and abroad for research and consulting. Joseph currently works as a Research Associate in the Data Intensive Computing Group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), the largest academic computing facility in the United States. In addition to his involvement with the DesignSafe project, his work at TACC focuses on partnering with users from academia, industry, and government to best utilize the computational power available at TACC with an emphasis on machine-learning and big-data workflows.