PLOTCON 2016: Scott Draves, Polyglot Visualization with the Beaker Notebook

Beaker is an open source tool for data analysis and data visualization. Beaker has an innovative UI and unique architecture to make it easier for novices to get started and enable experts to work faster. You can combine all your favorite visualization libraries even from different languages on the same page and working with the same data. Like IPython, Beaker uses a notebook-based UI metaphor, but Beaker was designed to be polyglot from the ground up. That is, a single notebook may contain cells from multiple languages that communicate with one another through a unique feature called autotranslation. You can set a variable in a Python cell and then read that variable in a subsequent R cell, and everything just works. Beaker comes with built-in support for Python, R, JavaScript, Java, Scala, Clojure, Torch/Lua, Julia, and more. Each part of your problem can be solved in the language best suited to it. For example, you can scrape the Web in Python, do a regression in R, and then visualize it with D3.js seamlessly in the same notebook. Draves will motivate the design, review the architecture, and gives a live demo of Beaker in action. Scott Draves is a pioneering software artist best known for creating the Electric Sheep, a collective intelligence consisting of 450,000 computers and people that uses mathematics and genetic algorithms to create an infinite abstract animation. In 1990 he received a BS in Mathematics from Brown University and in 1997 a PhD from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently employed by Two Sigma to develop the Beaker Notebook.