teaching

My Julia journey

In this post I am going to tell my Julia journey. I have read about Julia but not actually use it before version 0.7 just before 1.0. I work on Machine Learning and stochastic optimization (with evolutionary computation). In Machine Learning (and Deep Learning) I work nicely with Python (Scikit-learn and Keras/PyTorch). However, in optimization I usually did prototype in Python, and later have to translate to C++ for performance (well, not while the function evaluation takes too much).

My first Julia Package

For online teaching I use Moodle. I have a lot of experience using it (for more than 10 years). Unfortunately, the software could be improved a lot. My main complains are: You can import the grades using an Excel file. However, you cannot import the comments. I like to give comment to explain the reason of the qualifications. The Quiz is potent, but the creation of questions is very slow.

About online teaching

These days we have to be enclosed in our houses by the coronavirus (COVID-19), so in my University (in Granada) as the others in Spain, we had to became in online teaching expert in a weekend. For the courses we have following different approaches: Additional written material, several short videos about the materials, or conferences for giving the courses by video-conferences. All options have its advantages and drawbacks. However, because I like the feedback with the students (for instance, to make several examples in code about the concepts in my programming course), I have finally decided to give the course by video-conference.

Introduction to CMake

In my last course, I decided to give a small introduction about CMake. The reason is that, although we teach them Make, the majority of students do not use them in their programs. In fact, many times they create a “makefile” program to pretend they are using “make”, but actually, it is a bash script. My intention is to teach them Cmake to encourage them to use an automatic tool for compiling, expecting they use it more, by its simpler syntax.

Using Python for Business Intelligence

Two weeks ago I started my first teaching day, replacing a teacher that has still not gone to Ceuta (because the temporal contract was offered to many people, and all of them refuse it). Do not worry, they will have the material, I said to myself, naïvely. However, my Phd. advisor, the coordinator of the course, has decided to replace the practice classes from Knime to Python using the different tools availables.