VizCon planning

[mkborregaard]

Hi,
We've got the VizCon coming up a month from now, and we should start to build up the program. There'll be a welcome email coming up with some practical details as well, so this is for the content. I suggest doing it here on github, as discussions here tend to stay a little more on point and hit a crowd a little more focusedly than on discourse. Let's just ignore that this is the AbstractPlotting repo - it's a nice way to keep things together.

cc @KristofferC @tlienart @asinghvi17 @SebastianM-C @piever @logankilpatrick @c42f @daschw @pfitzseb @jkrumbiegel @SimonDanisch @strangeli @jheinen @vilim @oxinabox @glennmoy @BeastyBlacksmith

The idea is that we have 4.5 days together to give a massive push to plotting / visualization in Julia. Many attendees are involved with packages in JuliaPlots but the game is of course open for work on any aspect of plotting in Julia. If a big enough group agree on a single goal - like pushing Makie from "really promising" to "a relevant option as the daily plotting tool of choice for a larger group of people", it should be possible with the right coordination and planning of tasks. So let's start that process.

In practical terms, Thursday to Sunday will have roughly this structure:

• Start at 10.
• Presentations of packages and projects.
• Decision of tasks and formation of groups.
• Group work.
• Short feedback of results.
• Lunch 13-14, then
• Decision of tasks and formation of groups.
• Group work.
• Summary and presentations of the day's achievements and suggestions for the day after.
• End at 18, shared dinner.

On Monday, we will have a half day (ending at lunch) for summarizing and planning follow-up steps.

We'd like to have some presentations-for-contributors of packages, and some of the group work can take the form of discussion groups. Here are a number of projects and presentations we've already talked about having in there:

Projects

• Makie compatibility with RecipesBase recipes (lead Simon)
• Push Plots 1.0 (whatever that entails in terms of closing issues)(lead Daniel + Michael)
• Theming engine for Makie (lead Michael)
• Incorporate MakieLayout into Makie (lead Julius + Simon)
• Address the time-to-first-plot / static compilation (lead ?)
• ...

Other projects could include building recipes for those packages that don't have them yet, making StatsPlots recipes for models definable in StatsModels, finalizing the pgfplotsx backend to Plots, making VegaLite consume recipes, etc etc.

Discussion groups (perhaps plenary, perhaps in groups)

• Can we revamp RecipesBase recipes to be more powerful and simpler (would require LOTS of PRs updating existing recipes)
• Plan: how do we maintain Plots given it has 500 open issues (and growing)?
• What does the Julia ecosystem need to have in 1 year in terms of plotting?
• ...

Presentations-for-contributors

• Design of Makie (Simon)
• How do Plots recipes actually work? (Daniel)
• Theming Makie (Michael)
• ...

We hope to have a mix of discussions, coding individually, in smaller groups and teams, presentations, and fun!

To ensure progress it would be great to have some themes - it would be great if anyone would feel like leading one of these themes, and being responsible for identifying some issues to work on. These could be

Themes

• recipes
• web
• documentation
• ...

These are just stubs... now let's fill them in!

So, to everyone here, could you report if you have anything in particular you plan to be working on, suggest one or more projects, consider whether you could give a presentation of your favourite package or project, or lead up a theme? This is the kind of coordination that will make sure we all make the most of this opportunity, which essentially arrives extremely rarely in Julia development! Looking forward to hearing your input.

[mkborregaard]

Also, @kescobo @sjkelly @mcmcgrath13 (am I missing anyone?) have announced that they would like to join remotely. Sorry for forgetting to tag you above - we'll do our best to give you a feeling of participitating though you'll have to do it virtually :-)

[davidanthoff]

I might be able to join remotely for a bit. I’ll be in Munich, so at least time zone wouldn’t be a problem.

[KristofferC]

I can talk about PackageCompiler and some of the design choices we made in PGFPlotsX.jl that I think contributes to us having relatively few issues/bug reports.

[kescobo]

Given the timezone, I'm not certain how much I'll be able to join real time; do we have any further info about A/V and recording? If it's not possible, I'll at least try to catch up on issues and slack, though I may be doing most of my contributing while you're all out having beers...

On that note - can any locals send me a few good local brews so I can look for distributors near me? I figure this is a good excuse to do some drinking at work 🍻

[asinghvi17]

@mkborregaard, we should probably put down a paper discussion group, even if just for an hour or so.

[mkborregaard]

All great ideas - I really like the idea of participating remotely by drinking the local beers 😂

[Tokazama]

I'd love to contribute wherever I can throughout this. My schedule is super unpredictable lately though, so I'll just try to follow along and chime in and contribute when possible.

[jheinen]

I will be there on Friday and Saturday. If the schedule allows, I would love to demonstrate the new features of GR and also explain our deployment strategy (CI/CD). This is very important for the integration with other packages (Plots, GRUtils). At the moment I don't know if GR is still relevant for Makie. I have the impression that CairoMakie is quite sufficient. But I am very interested in an integration with current or future recipe systems (AbstractPlotting , etc.).

[piever]

There are a couple of topics that I would like to discuss (not sure about the format).

I think that StatsMakie needs a bit of a "push". I could probably start by introducing the StatsMakie design and API (grammar of graphics in Makie). Then it would be great to clean and finalize the implementation. This is closely linked to the recipes discussion: ideally, it should be possible for the StatsMakie pipeline to just return a list of plots with "recommended attributes", such as layout, or axis labeling.

The second topic is the relationship between Makie and Interact. This in turn has two aspects:

• porting Interact to share the same "web stack" as the WebGL version of Makie (WGLMakie)
• doing the same decoupling Makie does for plots, also for widgets: separate the structure and logic of the UI from the rendering, in such a way that it would be possible to switch from web-app to native app just by changing the backend (as it is for plots in Makie already).

The first topic (StatsMakie) should be feasible within the conference. The second topic is more of a long term plan, but I think it's worth discussing here, especially since right now it is a bit difficult in julia to make apps where both the UI and the plot are interactive, and Interact + WGLMakie could potentially address that.

[asinghvi17]

@jheinen, at the moment, CairoMakie doesn't support 3D (and has quite a few weird bugs). If we could get an interactive GR backend up, that would be really lovely! It would also be nice to support some form of TeX math in Makie (which I think GR does).

I think someone brought this up before, but it would also be great if we could integrate CoordinateTransforms and GeometryTypes. That would allow (IMO) a much more robust interface for transformation layers going forward.

[SimonDanisch]

I have no personal attachment to cairo, besides that it was easier to get things working for me... If I had some support from @jheinen, that would easily offset that advantage I suppose...

[asinghvi17]

We have https://github.com/JuliaPlots/GRMakie.jl which used to at least draw lines before the backend API changes. Maybe we could use that as a starting point?

[asinghvi17]

I've attempted to codify what we know so far about potential projects and talks into the Vizcon 2 project in JuliaPlots. The new columns are Projects and Talks.

Please feel free to add yourselves to them if you want to lead a project, or give a talk about something!

[Tokazama]

@asinghvi17, lots of nice stuff there! The CoordinateTransformations bit looks like a really nice clean one too considering how much it's used other places.

Are there any places where the new plots recipes stuff is being discussed or developed more specifically? I have some ideas but I'm not sure whether they are even applicable because I have now idea what's going on there.

[asinghvi17]

I think Simon was going to present a working example of Makie consuming RecipesBase's recipes on the fly at Vizcon, and Julius has a prototype of a new recipe system for Makie in MakieLayout.

[mcmcgrath13]

I'll be with @kescobo on the local beer participation train as the time zones are rough. I'll do my best to keep up with the conversation and follow along.

[BeastyBlacksmith]

I can give an overview of the current status of the pgfplotsx-Plots backend

[asinghvi17]

@jkrumbiegel would you be able to give a high-level talk on MakieLayout (preferably on the first day) for the integration project?

[jkrumbiegel]

Sure :) But I don't yet know definitively if I can already come on Thursday or only on Friday afternoon.

[vilim]

I will be happy to work on anything, though I have more experience with the Makie than the Plots ecosystem. I will be arriving on Thursday afternoon.

[kescobo]

@mcmcgrath13 First we need someone from Berlin to send recommendations... C'mon people, don't make me do my own research!

[BeastyBlacksmith]

Well there are the big brands "Berliner" and "Berliner Bürgerbräu" and a lot of microbreweries, which I don't know if you can get them abroard like "Quartiermeister", "Vagabund", "Eschenbräu" a minimalistic one called "Bier".

[asinghvi17]

@mkborregaard, could you post the details about the seminar room TU Berlin has given us over here? They seem to have been deleted from Slack.

I was curious about the possibility of streaming presentations live, similarly to how JuliaCon did it. Would that be possible at all?

[oxinabox]

I was curious about the possibility of streaming presentations live, similarly to how JuliaCon did it. Would that be possible at all?

Live streaming presentations is always either incredibly labour intensive, or incredibly expensive.

[Tokazama]

I would be happy if it was just recorded and action points relevant to the workgroups were made available live somewhere for people trying to participate remotely.

[asinghvi17]

We could also ask the presenters to capture their screen and audio (from the presenting laptop itself). That seems like a cheap and easy option, and we can always upload to some platform later.

[logankilpatrick]

I’ll try to take care of this ( I have a mic and a camera that I’m bringing) for both recording and remote participants. I will be attempting to film and set up a Plotting/visualization course for Julia Academy which is why I am attending VizCon!

[asinghvi17]

Perfect, we can figure something out there itself. Would JuliaLang be able to upload the videos onto their Youtube channel as well (for public distribution)? I think they did that for JuMP-dev...

[j-fu]

@mcmcgrath13 First we need someone from Berlin to send recommendations... C'mon people, don't make me do my own research!

The hyperlocal stuff I don't normally drink is Berliner Weisse, see e.g. here and its on tap in MA...

Just sent an email to register, plan to attend Sat-Mon. Working on this one: https://github.com/j-fu/VTKFig.jl meant as a showcase what can be done with vtk.

[SimonDanisch]

To add to this, I think it's best if we concentrate on the low-level building blocks of Makie and don't get too focused on high-level API questions. In my opinion the foundation needs to be really stable and powerful before we can build on top of that. Right now there are still many small issues, for example with buffers for multiple attributes, or text display, or clipping, or composition of multiple plot objects, and so on. These should ideally be solved before writing recipes unless all the recipe work should be redone at a later point when low-level things change..

I'd like to second that...Last vizcon I think we (I) spent too much time on discussions that were pretty irrelevant to the concrete things that need to be done now - this time i'd personally would like to spent more time to get things done...
Of course, people who want to discuss bigger, theoretical things, can still do this in a group :)

[asinghvi17]

Agreed, core development is probably best done in person.

I'd like to give a small (10 min or less) talk about MakieGallery and its architecture, and solicit some suggestions for improvements, if we have the time for that.

[mkborregaard]

@SimonDanisch so do you suggest we remove the "group discussions" and move them to smaller groups?
Great idea to focus on internals, but can 21 people do that at the same time? Maybe better to have "internals team" and "interface team" etc?

[c42f]

My goal is to establish a stronger foundation with scene clipping and axes

On a very nuts-and-bolts level, I'd be interested in the various aspects of making clipping work properly including the GPU and shader side of things (assuming that's still an open problem).

[asinghvi17]

It still is, to the best of my knowledge.

[SimonDanisch]

Well, scenes now rectangularly clip their content, and @jkrumbiegel uses this in MakieLayout to do correct clipping..but he got greedy and now also wants circular clipping etc :D

[asinghvi17]

Well it's not just him ;) - arbitrary clipping would be needed for earth plots!

[strangeli]

Hi,
I am kind of back to that type of life again which does include communication, be easy on me though... I was never good at short texts.

Here is what I felt responsible for so far w.r.t organization:

1. The secretary will give the attendees list to the door people and I will update it on Friday, Mach 13.

2. I will not be in Berlin on Thursday, March 12. Simon D will organize the keys for the first day (if you want to open/lock the room etc), from Friday on we can use my key.

3. If needed, we can use up to 5 rooms on Sat/Sun - that is where my key fits and no one is here anyway. The other days except for Thursday (i.e., Fri/Mon), we could co-use some of those rooms, too.

4. I ordered 25 guest accounts for internet access in case people have no eduroam.

5. Our technical assistant is on vacation. I may ask her next Monday if she has equipment for streaming if this is still needed. (I found a Canon 600D so far but it seems not suitable for streaming over long periods of time.) According to what I read here, we do have a cam, a mic, that is enough?!

6. Restaurants (I don't care, just because I was asked): My favourite around here is currently only open till 6pm (weird...) [1], then there is a very close and funny restaurant on a ship [2] and on my beloved long and lonely evenings in the office I order food or go to [3], [4] by bike and there is a lot of food in Moabit (near Turmstraße) not so far away. Hence, I will give you my customized suggestions on Friday Mar 13 depending on your willingness for mobility and adventure.

7. And for drinking - this is like a really traditional bar in that area: http://www.zwiebelfisch-berlin.de/, https://goo.gl/maps/vhdnhvaWCdYYqvu57

...? Lia

[1] Used to be a beer garden: http://www.schleusenkrug.de/contact.html
[2] Ship: https://www.capt-schillow.de/hier-finden-sie-uns/
[3] Vegan/vegetarian Indian restaurant: http://www.mysatyam.de/anfahrt.html
[4] Vietnamese/sushi around Savignyplatz - seems that I can't find it online. It is either closed or it is so cool that it has no google maps. Here is is still as Lemongrass https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/26735763#map=18/52.50736/13.32075 with a non-working website link. Anyway, I might find out. I always go to that corner and there is some Asian restaurant changing names once in a while.

[asinghvi17]

Thanks for the info, Lia! I had one other question - does the seminar room come with chalk included? I'm bringing along 8 sticks of Hagoromo, was wondering if that would be sufficient (I have had pretty bad experiences with the standard chalk brands, at least at my school 😄)

[mkborregaard]

OK everyone, the feedback on the program can be summarized with Elvis' undying words: "A little less conversation, a little more action". So I've taken out the discussions, and placed most of the presentations at the very beginning, where they should serve to get everyone on the same page for the most efficient collaboration. Again - please comment, this is just another rough scetch. Also, if you're mentioned by name in the schedule, please make sure you're happy to do what it says :-)

Note: edited schedule 6 March 11.30 CET.

[jkrumbiegel]

Ideally I would want to show MakieLayout before the group discussion on Makie recipes. It will probably change people's ideas a bit how recipes should be implemented compared to the single subplot architecture we have now.

So if possible I would like to be moved to the first day. The rest of the schedule looks very good to me so far :)

[mkborregaard]

I think that would be best, but you'll not be there before Friday afternoon, right? I think we need the recipes discussion at the very beginning. FWIW RecipesBase recipes don't actually really specify layouts, so for compatibility it's not really neaede.

EDIT: oh just saw you edited - will you be there for the start of the meeting?

[jkrumbiegel]

FWIW RecipesBase recipes don't actually really specify layouts, so for compatibility it's not really neaede

True, although for any new system they will, so the talk should be early, but not necessarily in front of the RecipesBase talk. But StatsMakie and Theming might be better afterwards.

And yes I'll be there for the start, for all who didn't get the PM :)

[j-fu]

Hi, in the sense of "talk first to collect the ideas, then work" you can reschedule my Sunday talk to any earlier slot, as the event I was supposed to participate in on the 12/13 fell victim to the virus...

[mkborregaard]

OK, I edited the schedule in the post above.

[mkborregaard]

Everyone - please remember to consider work themes or tasks you'd like to engage in. We'll still have discussions, but many of these will be in interest groups, to give the overall group as much flexibility as possible. Also, if you have an idea you'd like to pitch to the group - let us know if you'd like 5 minutes to show some slides and ideas!

[karlwessel]

My personal goal for the con is to get some insights on how backend implementation in Makie and Plots work and if it is possible to get Makie working with older OpenGL versions.

However, even if I couldn't learn anything about that during the con (which I strongly doubt), I consider this as a good occasion for concentrated hacking to improve this great visualisation ecosystem. For example by fixing issues of Plots.jl or improving the very promising backend for PGFPlotsX.

edit: It is also a nice occasion to visit my old university :)

[strangeli]

Thanks for the info, Lia! I had one other question - does the seminar room come with chalk included? I'm bringing along 8 sticks of Hagoromo, was wondering if that would be sufficient (I have had pretty bad experiences with the standard chalk brands, at least at my school smile)

Sorry for the late reply, there is always enough chalk in the room and I never had problems but feel free to bring your own.

Can anyone say again what is missing for this streaming thing? Our technical assistant does not know either and the online lectures are not streamed but recorded and uploaded such that I still don't know what streaming involves. So I heard someone of you is bringing a camera and we go with that, right?

As alternative, there seems to be a video conferencing room in the same building, ground floor (E-N 053). I asked for access and just got the immediate reply that we can use it from March 13-16 (Thursday is occupied). I am in home office today so I can check it out on Monday with the technical support person. It has a system which seems to make it easy to access remotely (without special software I was told so far) but the number of external attendees might be limited. I will keep you updated on the technical details. It is for free and nothing happens if we don't use it.

Btw, they canceled our German research meeting due to Corona, such that I will be there on Thursday, too.

[strangeli]

Ok, no the video conferencing needs a video conferencing equipment on the other side but we can use a digital meeting room of the German research network (DFN) in the normal seminar room. I created a vizcon 2 room already and can share the login details for everyone on Thursday (how and where to post the PIN, in slack?) and in addition, there is a streaming ("read-only") option for non-participants with chat option if wanted. Ok, now I feel better because I know how it could work - in theory :-).

We still need a webcam though. I count on whoever said will bring one.

[asinghvi17]

AFAIU, @logankilpatrick is bringing a camera. Slack would probably be best for the PIN, since it won't vanish until after the con (I think). Thanks for the setup!

[logankilpatrick]

I’m just bringing my iPhone 11 Pro which has a great camera along with a mic to record the speakers audio.

[pfitzseb]

I can also bring a camera if necessary.

[strangeli]

Cool, this is the docs for possible layouts if we use the DFN meeting room if anyone wants to checkout beforehand what seems suitable: https://docs.pexip.com/admin/changing_layout.htm

[asinghvi17]

This is the link to what will be (hopefully) the live stream of Vizcon! https://www.conf.dfn.de/stream/pfq8gtqq5mc

[glennmoy]

Hey guys, looking forward to meeting you all. I've dipped my toes into some plotting functionality here and there but I'm hoping to learn a few new things at vizcon and contribute what I can. See you in berlin!

[j-fu]

Bad news:

https://www.pressestelle.tu-berlin.de/menue/tub_medien/newsportal/innenansichten/2020/coronavirus_2019_ncov/sofortmassnahmen_fuer_alle_berliner_hochschulen_und_universitaeten :

Berlin universities (and also my insitute) cancel all events due to the virus...