- visual neuroscience and electrophysiology
- joined Laura Busse's lab, work on mouse vision and behaviour, while recording neurophysiology and doing optogenetic manipulation
- my python experience:
- needed visual stimulus presentation program
- found VisionEgg, written in Python by a neuroscientist/entomologist, flexibility, features we needed, and it was free!
- not just free, open source: code can be inspected and modified by anyone, if desired
- Python was the first open-source thing I'd used, eventually switched from windows to linux
- also use python for:
- neural spike sorting & data analysis
- database system for storing all our lab data
- simpler things like renaming a bunch of files/folders in nested hierarchy
- arithmetic, simple calculations instead of a calculator
- motivation:
- example: load data, analyze, plot, save
- quick intros: name, status, programming background, data analysis wants/needs
- helping each other out
- course is lecture + exercise class (Nick)
- lecture: introduce concepts, exercise class: practice the concepts
- grades:
- attendance: 30%, all or nothing
- can miss up to 3 out of 14 days, any more and no credit
- participation in both lecture and exercise class: 30%
- good, mediocre, none: 100%, 50%, 0%
- final project: 40%
- meet list of requirements that are fairly easy to fulfill
- code needs to run successfully
- work on it during last 2 or 3 exercise classes
- no homework! but programming is a skill, like any other language, need to practice listening/speaking it, or in this case, reading/writing it
- attendance: 30%, all or nothing
- Python basics
- Python basics 2
- collections, files
- numpy 1D arrays
- plotting with matplotlib
- numpy ND arrays, numpy functions
- algorithms
- organizing code, data, results
- version control with Git
- object-oriented programming
- data analysis with Pandas
- command line interfaces
- intro to GUIs: Jupyter notebook & PyQt
- data acquisition