Dr Jeremy Singer, University of Glasgow
25 February 2021

Abstract:
Love ’em or hate ’em, interactive computational notebooks are here to stay as a mainstream code development medium. In particular, the Jupyter system is widely used by the data science community. This presentation explores some use cases for programmatic introspection of a Jupyter notebook from within a notebook itself. We sketch a possible reflection API for Jupyter and describe how its implementation is complicated by the under-the-hood message flows of the Jupyter distributed system architecture.

Bio:
Jeremy Singer is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, where he has worked for the past 10 years. Jeremy’s research interests include programming language compilers and runtimes, memory management, manycore parallelism, and distributed systems. He currently co-leads the EPSRC-funded Capable VMs project. Jeremy is the author of the textbook “Operating System Foundations with Linux on the Raspberry Pi” and lead educator of the “Functional Programming in Haskell” massive open online course.