Third Annual JuliaCon Concludes

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 1 — “Julia is a great tool.” That’s what Nobel Laureate Thomas J. Sargent told 250 engineers, computer scientists, programmers, and data scientists during the third annual JuliaCon held at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Labs. This year’s JuliaCon was the biggest yet, and featured presentations describing how Julia is being used to solve complex problems in areas as diverse as economic modelling, spaceflight, bioinformatics and many others.

Professor Sargent went on to say: “We like Julia. We are very excited about Julia because our models are complicated. It’s easy to write the problem down, but it’s hard to solve it – especially if our model is high dimensional. That’s why we need Julia. Figuring out how to solve these problems requires some creativity. The guys who deserve a lot of the credit are the ones who figured out how to put this into a computer. This is a walking advertisement for Julia.” Professor Sargent told JuliaCon that the reason Julia is important is because the next generation of macroeconomic models is very computationally intensive, using high­dimensional models and fitting them over extremely large data sets.

Presenters at JuliaCon have included analysts, researchers and data scientists at the US Federal Reserve, BlackRock, Lincoln Labs, Intel, Conning and a number of universities around the world. Julia’s co­creators include Prof. Alan Edelman (Professor, MIT), Dr. Viral Shah (Ph.D., UCSB), Dr. Jeff Bezanson (Ph.D., MIT) and Stefan Karpinski (AB, Harvard) along with a community of 500 contributors today.

About Julia

Julia (http://julialang.org/) is the hot new programming language for data and analytics. Julia combines the functionality of quantitative environments such as Matlab, R, SPSS, Stata, SAS and Python with the speed of production programming languages like Java and C++ to solve big data and analytics problems. It delivers dramatic improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity, and productivity for data scientists, algorithmic traders, quants, scientists, and engineers who need to solve massive computation problems quickly and accurately.

The number of Julia users has grown dramatically during the last five years – doubling every 9 months. It is taught at MIT, Stanford and dozens of universities worldwide. Julia 0.5 will launch in July 2016 and Julia 1.0 in 2017.

About Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent is Professor of Economics at New York University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2011 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on macroeconomics. Together with John Stachurski he founded quant­econ.net, a Julia and Python based learning platform for quantitative economics focusing on algorithms and numerical methods for studying economic problems as well as coding skills.

Source: Julia Computing