Please give a brief introduction of yourself.

My name is Shantanu Choudhary. I have been associated with FOSSEE Project since July 09. Before that for a year I was working for Sarai.

My IRC nick is ‘baali’ and I hang out at ##linux-india, #sarai,
#lug-jaipur channels of Freenode.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

I have worked on project for creating a offline-wikipedia DVD distribution, it is available at http://code.google.com/p/offline-wikipedia/. I was involved with floss-include project at Sarai, and alongside was also working on customized linux based distribution for Indian languages for indlinux project. I was also helping out some fellows with their floss-fellowships at Sarai.

Presently at FOSSEE, we are creating a course for non CS/IT students, on how Python, Linux based
distributions, Version Control Systems(hg, git) can be used for their projects and research work. I have also started contributing to projects like SciPy and Mayavi with small patches.


What will your workshop be, exactly ?

This workshop is aimed to be an introduction to SciPy through Image Processing. The general ideas introduced during this workshop will be useful to do any kind of scientific work using Python.


What do you hope to accomplish by conducting this workshop? What do you expect ?

After this workshop, we are hoping that more people from academic(students and teachers) and industry would start using Python and FOSS based tools for their various Science based Research.


What is FOSSEE and how you associated with FOSSEE ?

FOSSEE is acronym which stands for Free and Open Source software for Science and Engineering Education. More information are available at http://fossee.in/FOSSEE . I am with “Python for scientific computing” sub-group of FOSSEE project. I have created a customized distro from Ubuntu that has all the packages useful for Scientific computing using Python. IPython, Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib, Mayavi and Sage etc. I also help the rest of team in conducting Python based workshops across various colleges, some trivial work based on django and other small things.


What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?

Mostly contribution are driven by idea of “help yourself” but it ends up helping/inspiring lot more the just one, so don’t hesitate, just do it :)


Why did you choose scipy over other scientific computing packages ?

It is based on Python.


How do you use scipy in your day-to-day activities. ?

I am still in process of learning it. We use SciPy for various workshops we conduct. Puneeth is converting a course of Digital control to Python, and he uses SciPy packages all the time.


What advice will you give to people moving from closed source scientific computing libraries to scipy ?

One can never get as easy language as Python, so shifting to SciPy will speed up the process of getting meaningful results.


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify >

I have never been to gnunify before :( , but better late then never.