Paul Romer
Paul Romer, a University Professor at NYU, was co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences. His work lies in the intersection of economics, innovation, technology, and urbanization. The central conclusion is that there are many feasible ways to speed human progress. Before coming to NYU, Paul taught at Stanford, and while there, started Aplia, an education technology company he later sold to Thomson Learning. Prior to his current role at NYU, Paul taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester.
Sessions
The Jupyter ecosystem offers powerful tools for authoring documents that run code. An obvious application coming out of the reproducible research movement would be for academics to start distributing their working papers as Jupyter notebooks instead of PDFs. But authors won't switch to notebooks until Jupyter is ubiquitous in the specific sense that every interested reader has access to an open-source reader/runner for notebooks that is (1) user-friendly, (2) robust, (3) complete, and (4) safe.
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User-friendly means that neither installing nor using the reader/runner requires use of the command line.
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Robust means that installing other software will not break it. (We'll have fun talking about how far the Python ecosystem is from this requirement.)
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Complete means that authors can use the entire Python standard library and all the external libraries used by researchers.
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Safe means that running notebooks should be safer than opening PDFs.
Safer than PDFs is not a high bar. PDFs are a dangerously effective vector for distributing malware. Nevertheless, safety is by far the most challenging of the four goals.