Ensuring Open Source Thrives in a Global Economy

Travis E. Oliphant

January 7, 2020 at 7:30 P.M. at the Virginia Air and Space Center in downtown Hampton, Virginia

Abstract

Open Source has transformed the global economy enabling the creation of nearly all the major technical innovations over the past decades. Still, there are cracks at the foundation where millions of users depend on software created and maintained by volunteers with no clear sustainable funding path. This problem needs to be addressed in many ways to ensure the promise of collaborative computing and so community-led open-source can continue to provide a ubiquitous software fabric that enables solutions to some of society’s difficult problems. Dr. Oliphant will discuss this in the context of his history creating SciPy, NumPy, and Anaconda, and how these have been used and provide a peek at emerging future opportunities.

Speaker

Dr. Travis E. Oliphant is a Founder and CEO/CTO of Quansight, an innovation incubation company that builds and connects companies with open-source communities to help both gain actionable, quantitative insight from their data. In 2019, Dr. Oliphant Co-founded OpenTeams, a partner company of Quansight, which aims to enable sustainable funding opportunities for open source software. Dr. Oliphant previously co-founded Anaconda Inc. and is still a Director. Since 1997, he has worked in the Python ecosystem, notably as the primary creator of the NumPy package and as a founding contributor of the SciPy package. Dr. Oliphant also started the Numba project and organized and led the teams that built Conda, Dask, Bokeh, and XND. Dr. Oliphant has a Ph.D. from the Mayo Clinic and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Brigham Young University.

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