Sho: Scientific Computing on .NET Steroids Tutorial

Sumit Basu of Microsoft Research presents this tutorial at Faculty Summit 2011. Sho, based on Microsoft’s IronPython, is a dynamic programming environment that connects seamlessly to Microsoft .NET, making a broad set of languages, libraries, and computing resources instantly available to your scripts. It also gives you all of the math and visualization libraries you have come to expect from other computing environments. In this tutorial, we will explain what Sho is and what it can do for you.

Speaker Bios

Sumit Basu is a Researcher at Microsoft Research in the Machine Learning Group; he joined MSR after completing his PhD at MIT in 2002. He is one of the architects/developers of Sho (along with John Platt, Chuck Jacobs, and Erin Renshaw), an interactive environment for data analysis and prototyping, which allows for fast and flexible scientific computations in a dynamic language (IronPython) along with seamless connections to compiled .NET libraries. Outside of dynamic languages, his research focus is on interactive machine learning, within which he investigates how human judgments, knowledge, and intent can best be leveraged to train or guide complex learning algorithms; these days he is particularly interested in how algorithmic approaches can be used to teach humans new information. He has worked in a variety of application areas for this technology, including interactive tutoring, music creation and analysis, data mining and organization, diagnosing computer systems, and speech/conversational analysis.