Julia - what interesting things are you doing?

Community
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the Julia language site has some nice whitepapers on projects which use Julia.
However we are seeing more people ask for help here - which is a great thing!
I would like to hear what they are using Julia for in their work. For three reasons
a) to keep us all motivated and interested
b) the cross-pollination effect of hey - thats not my field but technique XYZ could work here
c) to help answer social media posts like the recent Twitter thread on real life Julia usage

So a plea to posters - please say a little bit of what you are doing.
Is there a case for a Julia Use Cases section in Community?

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Solving macroeconomic models, and incidentally making sure our server room is nice and warm.

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A “Use Cases” section would be highly beneficial, it will give inspiration to others and opportunities for co-operating.

Currently I am using Julia to write parser functions for binary results to ease my workflow. It works! But not pretty enough to share yet :sweat_smile:

Kind regards

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I’m just doing basic data science, trying to see if there are associations between the microbes in the guts of kids and brain or cognitive development. The actual computational methods are boring, but the subject matter is quite cool I think

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Talking about microbes, my father worked in a gastrointestinal research unit. The unit did pioneering work on Tagamet.
My dad told me about the work on H Pylorii - in the early days people mocked the Australian(?) doctor who suggested H Pylorii was responsible for ulcers. These days is is accepted fact.

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I am making models of plasticity and spiking neurons. It involves PDE, bifurcation theory and Jump processes.

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I’m using it do help analyze data for the event horizon telescope. Nothing too crazy in terms of computation yet but I’m hoping to write a large scale pipeline in julia soon

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Cool! Is it a solo project or are other people using Julia in the collaboration?

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I am developing methods and software for the study of the structure and thermodynamics of solutions of molecules of complex shapes (like proteins, polymers, etc.)

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Yeah, this was a rare instance of the crackpot turning out to be right :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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Cf Ignaz Semmelweis, who was mocked for the outlandish idea that doctors should wash their hands after autopsies, before they help women in labor.

A lot of new theories that turn out to be correct are mocked by contemporaries. Unfortunately, this is not a reliable way to pick the winners early, as there are >1000 crackpots for every paradigm-changing scientist.

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I am not doing anything special on the Julia-side either, but I’ve been able to pick up the basics of the language in a REALLY short amount of time and I have been using it as a toolset for analysis of molecular dynamics data(in a rather broad sense…). Once I was convinced that it would be a valid alternative to Python+C I quickly translated all my codebase to Julia without much trouble and, until now, I only see profit :slight_smile:
I am involved in two research projects at the moment:

  1. using DNA as building block for self-healing polymers with tunable “architectures”
  2. investigating the presence of a second critical point deep in the supercooled region of liquid water(my master’s thesis!)
    What I love about it is that I have fast-running and easily-readable scripts + interactive notebooks for exploratory work and cool graphics all in the same language
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At work, I am using Julia daily for countless tasks related to satellite mission planing and AOCS (attitude and orbit control subsystem) analysis. Many of those functions are available in two toolboxes: SatelliteToolbox.jl and ReferenceFrameRotations.jl. I even developed a mission satellite simulator in which the core is 100% Julia (interface is Qt):

Forplan
Forplan1920Ă—1535 521 KB

Besides that, as a hobby, I am developing a package called PrettyTables.jl that tries to provide a general framework for printing tables to text, HTML, and LaTeX. It is ready to be used, and, if everything goes right, it will become the backend for text/plain printing of DataFrames.jl.

At a much more slow pace, I am trying to finish the first version of TextUserInterfaces.jl. This package has the goal to provide an API to build text user interfaces using NCurses. However, it turns out to be way more complicated that I initially thought :slight_smile: Anyway, in its current state, we can build simple interfaces like this:

TUI-TicTacToe

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I mainly use Julia for developing problem-specific algorithms in the area of decision making under uncertainty. My focus is more on Operations Research problems such as supply chain, transportation,…

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Things are now perilously close to someone writing a 2048 game in Julia.

I hope you realize that this would have far-reaching consequences; having it available as a project one can install with pkg> add would seriously affect the productivity of a lot of people here.

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:smile: I totally agree! This means that a 2048 game is now my goal. This will be the benchmark that will tell me that I have an initial version of the API.

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You can skip to the very end. Not exactly 2048, but there’s potential:))

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That’s really interesting, do you have any reading recommendations for someone interested in hearing about the theory behind it?

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Best book on the microbiome bar none is I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It doesn’t talk much about gut-microbiome-brain axis, but it’s a great starting point for further explanation

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Is this established? I know (very generally) about the microbiome and its effect on health, but I hadn’t heard about its effect on the brain.

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