Back to the NIRC

Tomorrow, I'll discuss student and researcher exchange opportunities between Italy and South Africa with colleagues and friends. Continue reading

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Coding Summer School 2024

The two-week annual Coding Summer School, jointly organised by the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) and the National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS), started today. The school takes place in-person at 30 “nodes” across South Africa while streaming live, and 800 students will be attending this year. The hybrid format of the summer school is an example […]

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Closing Time

The calendar year, which for those of us working out of the Southern Hemisphere coincides with the academic / work year, is coming to a close, and while I am not planning on taking a particularly long break and I actually have got a big stack of TODOS to tackle come Jan 3rd, one can’t […]

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Converis Africa User Group

Several excellent comics (Dilbert perhaps being the most popular one) focus on the managemnt and/or reporting overload of the modern workplace. Universities are not immune to this plague, and some might say they’re worse off because a) academics and students are notoriously reluctant to be bound by rules and prone to complaining b) universities often […]

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Soapbox Science Cape Town – 25 Nov 2023

BRINGING (women in) SCIENCE TO THE STREETS! V&A Waterfront Cape Town – 25th November 2023 STAY TUNED! @SoapboxScienceCT

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3rd Research Forum Southern Africa – Spain

Today I spent a few hours at the 3rd Southern Africa – Spain Research Forum, whose theme was Science for the Global Good: A North‐South Dialogue and where I participated in the round table “NAVIGATING RESEARCH IN SOUTHERN AFRICA WITH A FOREIGN/EU BACKPACK ‐ TO COLLABORATE OR NOT TO COLLABORATE?” and met some old and […]

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Dutch Delegation Visit to UCT Astronomy

In an exciting display of international cooperation and astronomical exploration, the University of Cape Town (UCT) hosted a delegation from the Netherlands government at the RW James Building on 14 October (Saturday Night Fever). The event, organised by the UCT Department of Astronomy, included some speakers who shared their insights on the future possibilities of astronomy […]

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BRICS Astronomy Data Science Hackathon

The BRICS Astronomy Working Group Meeting 2023 was hosted by South Africa at SAAO‘s headquarters in Cape Town. The meeting ended on a high note with a Data Science Hackathon organized by Hack4dev and by the indefatigable Eslam Hussein in particular. Well done to the 30 participants and to the tutors who showed them the […]

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HELP-ing Extragalactic Surveys in the Netherlands

I spent the (mostly rainy, apart from a sun-kissed conference dinner on a “party boat” cruise on the canals:-) week at Leiden’s Lorentz Center with 50-odd jolly astro folks discussing extragalactic surveys within a workshop I helped organise as part of the HELP project. The sometime confusing dynamic agenda allowed for plenty of opportunities to get together in small […]

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Working on an IDIA

The first meeting organized by the recently established UCT/UWC/NWU/UP Inter-University Institute for Data-Intensive Astronomy successfully came to a close last night with a braai at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). The Data Science Workshop held at UWC on 12/13 April 2016 brought together researchers from IDIA partners, affiliated research organisations and industry partners from IBM, SAP and […]

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