Research Computing and Data Science Events

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The Fast and the Curious Hackathon 2024

Welcome to the RCDS hackathon 2024 – The fast and the curious!

Friday 12 July 2024, 10.00-17.00, SK Campus


You are welcome to join us for another instalment of the Graduate School’s Research Computing and Data Science Programme hackathon. Last year, we experimented with GitHub’s Copilot; this year, we will speed up code. You can leverage LLMs, different programming languages, good old Stackoverflow, or anything else you can think of – as long as your code runs within our Python test framework.

We recommend working in teams, but individual contributions are fine. You will receive a set of short-ish tasks and race them against the original version on one computer. The team with the best overall speedup over all tasks will receive a prize.

RCDS Summer School - Fundamentals for Research Computing and Data Science

09:30-16:30 | 25 – 29 September 2023 | South Kensington Campus

The Graduate School’s RCDS team is inviting new MSc, MRes and doctoral students to a week-long summer school just before the autumn term start.

If you are new to programming and would like to gain skills that underpin a wide variety of research projects, join us for five days of hands-on programming and data science activities. You will learn the basis of Python and try out scientific packages that will enable you to complete a realistic project on the last day.

The pace will be suitable for complete beginners (or those who have taken a programming course but never practiced) and lots of help will be available.

You will learn about:
  • Python programming concepts and syntax
  • Working with external packages:
    • NumPy package for numerical calculations
    • Pandas for data analysis and manipulation
    • Matplotlib for data visualisation
  • Working with JSON data format
  • How to put all of the above together

Please view the full schedule below:

You&AI Hackathon 2023

Dear coders!

The Graduate School's Research Computing and Data Science (RCDS) teaching programme warmly invites you to explore AI-assisted programming with colleagues and industry experts.

Wondering what AI-assisted coding is? Maybe you’re wondering how best to include it in your daily work? This one-day event will give you the opportunity to talk to experts involved in building the tools that are changing the way we work. Afterwards, you’ll code together with your colleagues (or engage in a way that you see fit). At the end of the day, we will compare our notes over food and drinks.

You&AI Hackathon | 10:00-17:00 | Friday 30 June 2023
SALC 5, Sherfield Building, South Kensington Campus

Programme:
  • Introduction from the RCDS team
  • Talk and Q&A from AI industry experts (GitHub and Microsoft)
  • Catered lunch
  • Coding task explanation - there will be a choice between two reasonably-sized tasks - data cleaning or implementing a mathematical model
  • Group work on the tasks with support from organisers
  • Sharing our experience over catered food and drink