Newsletter – March 2018

We wanted to thank all Julia users and well wishers for the support and for being part of the Julia Community, and to give an update on some exciting developments for March 2018:

  1. JuliaCon 2018
  2. New Julia Case Studies
  3. Julia Computing Product, Service and Domain Updates
  4. Recent Julia Blog Posts and News Articles
  5. Upcoming and Recent Julia Events and Meetup Groups
  6. Julia Jobs, Fellowships and Internships
  7. Contact Us, About Julia and Julia Computing

1. JuliaCon 2018:

JuliaCon is coming to University College London Aug 7-11, 2018.

  • Corporate Sponsorship: JuliaCon 2018 has corporate sponsorship opportunities available. JuliaCon 2018 will be held Aug 7-11, 2018 at University College London.

  • Call for Proposals: Everyone who is interested is strongly encouraged to submit a proposal, regardless of level of experience with Julia or as a speaker. JuliaCon thrives on having talks ranging from introductory to advanced. If you are reading this and work with Julia in any form, you are encouraged to submit a proposal. Proposals may be submitted for talks, lightning talks, workshops, posters and package collaboration. Other ideas and suggestions, such as a topic or focus for a hackathon, are also welcome. Please click here for more details, proposal advice and submission.

  • Mentorship for First-Time Speakers: JuliaCon 2018 offers mentorship for first-time speakers and presenters. Details are available here. Please indicate in your proposal submission if you would be interested in mentorship. If you are willing to mentor a first-time speaker including providing feedback on abstracts or presentations, discussing presentation skills and more, please sign up here.

  • Application for Travel Assistance: If financial assistance will impact your ability to attend JuliaCon in London Aug 7-11, you are encouraged to apply now. Please note that you can begin your application today and finish later; assessing demand for financial assistance early will help us to better accommodate more people. The submission deadline is April 30.

2. New Julia Case Studies:

Please visit our website for the latest Julia case studies.

Now-Casting Economics: Now-Casting Economics uses Julia to reduce macroeconomic modeling time from weeks to days. According to Senior Economists Thomas Hasenzagl and Filippo Pellegrino, “Given the computational intensity, Julia seemed the natural programming language to use. Julia significantly improved the computational efficiency and speed of the nowcasting model. Switching from Matlab to Julia reduced the run time from weeks to days.”

Fugro Roames: Fugro Roames engineers use a combination of LiDAR and high resolution aerial photography to create a detailed 3D map of the physical condition of the electrical network and possible encroachment. Then they use machine learning to identify points on the network that have failed or are at risk of failure.

MIT Robot Locomotion: The MIT Robot Locomotion Group programs legged robots to walk so that they can explore remote regions, assist in disaster response or travel places that are unsafe for humans, such as minefields and contaminated sites. Roboticists Robin Deits and Twan Koolen explain: “We find Julia to be more productive than Java. Compared to C++, we found that Julia is much more productive, while retaining similar performance. Julia’s Python-like productivity and C++-like speed allow us to avoid having to make decisions regarding when to move to the fast language.”

3. Julia Computing Product, Service and Domain Updates

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Julia Computing continues to undertake a number of innovative consulting and custom development projects involving artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Julia’s machine learning capabilities are integrated with JuliaDB, making it possible to ingest data from a variety of sources, apply machine learning and generate insights quickly. Julia Computing employs many of the core developers of Julia and its machine learning packages. Please contact us if you are interested in partnering with Julia Computing on projects involving artificial intelligence, machine learning or deep learning.

  • Julia for Government: Julia’s use by government agencies continues to grow. Users include the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Ames Laboratory, Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

  • Parallel Computing with JuliaBox: JuliaBox is available at scale with parallel computing capabilities. JuliaBox runs in the cloud on dozens, hundreds or thousands of nodes, depending on your requirements. As always, there is no download required with JuliaBox – you can run it straight from your browser using a Jupyter notebook. Full JuliaBox documentation including examples and reference information for parallel functionality is available here. For pricing, a free 2 week trial, or more information about parallel computing with JuliaBox, please contact us and let us know how many nodes you require. The free version of JuliaBox continues to be fully supported for all current and new users with the latest version of Julia, package updates, new features and improved memory, flexibility and reliability.

  • JuliaPro: JuliaPro is the fast, free way to install the latest version of Julia on your laptop or desktop including the Julia compiler, profiler, integrated development environment, 100+ carefully curated packages, data visualization and plotting. There is also a paid version, JuliaPro Enterprise, which includes all of the features of JuliaPro plus support, integration with Microsoft Excel and can be purchased with an indemnity contract for an additional fee.

  • JuliaDB: JuliaDB is a high performance database for in-memory and distributed computing. It is a coherent environment for analytics, all in Julia, for storing and computing on large distributed datasets. An Intro to JuliaDB video tutorial is available online.

4. Recent Julia Blog Posts and News Articles

a. Recent Julia Blog Posts

b. Julia and Julia Computing News Articles

  • Dhaka Tribune: “Alan Edelman to Train Bangladeshi AI Developers”

  • YourStory: “Julia Computing has developed a unique and high performing programming language with rich applications in AI and Machine Learning.”

  • Application Development Trends: “As a data scientist who has been using the language for 5 years now, Julia is by far the best programming language for analyzing and processing data.”

  • Datanami: “Jupyter is the successor to the iPython notebook, and as such is closely aligned with Python, but it also supports R, Scala, and Julia.”

  • efinancialcareers: “While Julia is not yet among the most in-demand programming languages on Wall Street, its growth rate is impressive and hedge funds are among the early-adopters.”

5. Upcoming and Recent Julia Events and Meetup Groups

a. Upcoming Julia Events

b. Recent Julia Events

c. Julia Meetup Groups:

There are 26 Julia Meetup groups worldwide with more than 5 thousand members. If there’s a Julia Meetup group in your area, we hope you will consider joining, participating and helping to organize events. If there isn’t, we hope you will consider starting one.

6. Julia Jobs and Internships

Do you work at or know of an institution looking to hire Julia programmers as staff, research fellows or interns? Would your employer be interested in hiring interns to work on open source packages that are useful to their business? Help us connect members of our community to great opportunities by sending us an email, and we’ll get the word out!

There are more than 200 Julia jobs currently listed on Indeed.com, including jobs at Google, Facebook, IBM, KPMG, Ernst & Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, Comcast, Zulily, National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Brown, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame, MIT, University of Chicago and many more.

7. Contact Us

Please contact us if you wish to:

  • Purchase or obtain license information for Julia products such as JuliaPro, JuliaPro Enterprise, JuliaRun, JuliaDB, JuliaFin or JuliaBox
  • Obtain pricing for Julia consulting projects for your organization
  • Schedule Julia training for your organization
  • Share information about exciting new Julia case studies or use cases
  • Spread the word about an upcoming conference, workshop, training, hackathon, meetup, talk or presentation involving Julia
  • Partner with Julia Computing to organize a Julia meetup, conference, workshop, training, hackathon, talk or presentation involving Julia
  • Submit a Julia internship or job posting

About Julia and Julia Computing

Julia is the fastest high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many other domains. Julia solves the two language problem by combining the ease of use of Python and R with the speed of C++. Julia provides parallel computing capabilities out of the box and unlimited scalability with minimal effort. For example, Julia has run at petascale on 650,000 cores with 1.3 million threads to analyze over 56 terabytes of data using Cori, the world’s sixth-largest supercomputer. With more than 1.8 million downloads and +101% annual growth, Julia is one of the top programming languages developed on GitHub. Julia adoption is growing rapidly in finance, insurance, machine learning, energy, robotics, genomics, aerospace, medicine and many other fields.

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by all the creators of Julia to develop products and provide professional services to businesses and researchers using Julia. Julia Computing offers the following products:

  • JuliaPro for data science professionals and researchers to install and run Julia with more than one hundred carefully curated popular Julia packages on a laptop or desktop computer.
  • JuliaRun for deploying Julia at scale on dozens, hundreds or thousands of nodes in the public or private cloud, including AWS and Microsoft Azure.
  • JuliaFin for financial modeling, algorithmic trading and risk analysis including Bloomberg and Excel integration, Miletus for designing and executing trading strategies and advanced time-series analytics.
  • JuliaDB for in-database in-memory analytics and advanced time-series analysis.
  • JuliaBox for students or new Julia users to experience Julia in a Jupyter notebook right from a Web browser with no download or installation required.

To learn more about how Julia users deploy these products to solve problems using Julia, please visit the Case Studies section on the Julia Computing Website.

Julia users, partners and employers hiring Julia programmers in 2018 include Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Comcast, Disney, Ernst & Young, Facebook, Ford, Google, IBM, Intel, KPMG, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, PwC, Uber, and many more.