We are pleased to announce that the IPython project has received a $1.15M grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, that will support IPython development for the next two years (1/1/2013-12/31/2014). The grant, which is being made to the University of California, Berkeley and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, will enable the project to focus on developing the IPython Notebook as a general tool for scientific and technical computing that is open, collaborative and reproducible.
The grant ( html | pdf ) will fund the following project staff for two years:
- Fernando Perez, UC Berkeley, ¾ time project PI
- Brian Granger, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, ¾ time project co-PI
- Min Ragan-Kelley, UC Berkeley, full time lead project engineer
- Paul Ivanov, UC Berkeley, Postdoc, full time developer
- Thomas Kluyver, UC Berkeley, Postdoc, full time developer
- Matthew Brett, UC Berkeley, ½ time researcher (Y1), applied statistics Notebooks
- JB Poline, UC Berkeley, ½ time researcher (Y1), applied statistics Notebooks
The main objectives of the grant are:
- Build interactive JavaScript widgets for the IPython Notebook that enable computations and visualizations to be controlled with UI controls (sliders, buttons, etc.).
- Improve the IPython Notebook format by creating libraries for converting Notebooks to various formats (LaTeX, PDF, HTML, Presentations) and integrating these into the Notebook web application.
- Adding multiuser support to the Notebook web application, to enable small to medium sized groups of trusted individuals to run a central Notebook server for collaborative research and teaching.
- Develop IPython Notebooks for applied statistics in collaboration with Jonathan Taylor, who will use these materials in his Applied Statistics course at Stanford (STAT 191)
The grant will also provide resources for two development sprints per year at UC Berkeley, which will include all of the core IPython developers, as well as funding for cloud computing resources (for things like CI hosting and nbviewer) and conference travel for project staff.
We'd like to thank Josh Greenberg, our program director at the Sloan foundation, for the phenomenal guidance and support he provided during the grant proposal preparation and detailed review process. We look forward to working with him over the next few years!
And last but not least, we want to thank the entire community of users and developers of IPython, without whom this would not have been possible: IPython is a project driven strictly by the real-world needs of its users, and therein lies its value.