Francesco Benincasa, Master of Science in Software Engineering, is a designer and developer. He is a GNU/Linux and Python expert and has vast experience in many languages and applications. He has been using Python as the primary language for more than 10 years, together with JavaScript and framewoks such as Plone or Django.
He is interested in advanced web and network developing as well as scientific data manipulation and visualization. Over the last few years, he has been using graphical Python libraries such as Matplotlib/Basemap and scientific libraries such as NumPy/SciPy, as well as scientific applications such as GrADS, NCO, and CDO.
Currently, he is working at the Earth Science Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (www.bsc.es) as a Research Support Engineer for the World Meteorological Organization Sand and Dust Storms Warning Advisory and Assessment System (sds-was.aemet.es).
Valerio Maggio has a PhD in Computational Science from the University of Naples "Federico II" and is currently a Postdoc researcher at the University of Salerno.
His research interests are mainly focused on unsupervised machine learning and software engineering, recently combined with semantic web technologies for linked data and Big Data analysis.
Valerio started developing open source software in 2004, when he was studying for his Bachelor's degree. In 2006, he started working on Python, and has since contributed to several open source projects in this language. Currently, he applies Python as the mainstream language for his machine learning code, making intensive use of matplotlib to analyze experimental data.
Valerio is also a member of the Italian Python community and enjoys playing chess and drinking tea.
Jonathan Street is a well-known researcher in the fields of physiology and biomarker discovery. He began using Python in 2006 and extensively used matplotlib for many figures in his PhD thesis. He shares his interest in Python data tools by giving lectures and guiding educational sessions for regional groups, as well as writing on his blog at http://jonathanstreet.com.
Dr. Allen Chi-Shing Yu is a postdoctoral researcher working in the field of cancer genetics. He obtained his BSc degree in Molecular Biotechnology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009, and obtained a PhD in Biochemistry from the same university in 2013. Allen's PhD research primarily involved genomic and transcriptomic characterization of novel bacterial strains that can use toxic fluoro-tryptophans but not canonical tryptophan for propagation, under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Tze-Fei Wong and Prof. Ting-fung Chan. The findings demonstrated that the genetic code is not an immutable construct, and a small number of analogue-sensitive proteins are stabilizing the assignment of canonical amino acids to the genetic code.
Soon after his microbial studies, Allen was involved in the identification and characterization of a novel mutation marker causing Spinocerebellar Ataxia—a group of genetically diverse neurodegenerative disorders. Through the development of a tool for detecting viral integration events in human cancer samples (ViralFusionSeq), he has entered the field of cancer genetics. As the postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Nathalie Wong's lab, he is now responsible for the high-throughput sequencing analysis of hepatocellular carcinoma, as well as the maintenance of several Linux-based computing clusters.
Allen is proficient in both wet-lab techniques and computer programming. He is also committed to developing and promoting open source technologies, through a collection of tutorials and documentations on his blog at http://www.allenyu.info. Readers wishing to contact Dr. Yu can do so via the contact details on his website.