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Sharing Jupyter notebooks online

20th March 2021 by Aidan O'Donnell

You have a brilliant Jupyter notebook you’ve been working on.

If only you could share it with the world! Here’s are some options for getting your great notebook online.

 

  • If you just want to show a notebook to people without them running the code, nbviewer does the job by showing the cells and their output and supplying a link where your notebook will always live. If your visitor likes what they see, they can immediately launch a functioning version via a Binder link, or download the .ipynb file. Here’s a simple example of what you see.

 

  • If your notebook is in a github repo, you can to go https://mybinder.org/, supply the repository url and it will serve up all the repo files, with the notebook cells showing output. If the notebook needs modules that aren’t builtins, you can add a requirements.txt file to the repo, so that Binder knows they’re needed when it builds your online notebook environment.

 

  • The Voilà package “turns Jupyter notebooks into standalone web applications” or if you prefer, it puts only the cell output on the webpage. Where it gets really useful is by involving widgets from ipywidget to allow user interaction. Here are some examples running as Heroku apps:
  • an OSINT quiz built using only text, user input and images
  • some random notes on Welsh Senedd elections, with (unlabelled) maps, graphs and drop down filters

 

  • jupyter{book} lets you build a complete book using notebook elements. Here’s an example of a jupyter book with four chapters and here’s a gallery of books.

 

A github repo with Github Pages enabled can run as a webpage using a package called nbinteract but I’ve found it has trouble loading widgets, as seen in some of the tutorial pages.

Of course, Jupyter notebooks are not the only option: Kaggle, Google Colab, Iodide, Azure and many more. There’s an episode of the podcast Talk Python To Me which features the authors of a paper that reviewed 60 (!) of them.

Filed Under: Blog, Research Tagged With: interaction, jupyter, notebooks, python, web dev

NHS Hack Day returns to Cardiff

26th January 2020 by Aidan O'Donnell

At the end of semester two our 2019 students set off (armed with a full semester of javascript) for the Cardiff NHS Hack Day.

This regular event moves around the UK and brings together health specialists, technologists and anyone at all who’s got a suggestion about improving any aspect of healthcare.

There’s an overview of the Cardiff event by one of the judges available here and an account of several of this year’s projects here.

Our Computational Journalism students spent two days working on a app called “Can I eat this?” which allows users with dietary restrictions to scan barcodes on packaging see if a product is safe to consume — their app and their presentation to the judges is available on the Hack Day website and the code is here.

 

Above photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: collaboration, hackday, interaction, issues, local, nhs, student project

Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

7th June 2017 by Martin Chorley

The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.

Filed Under: Blog, Research, Teaching, The Lab Tagged With: ai, chatbot, coding, data, education, education innovation, interaction, oss, students, summer project, tools

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