JuliaCon workshops

[dmm]

JuliaCon this year is 8 days of workshops (July 20-27), following by 3 days of the main conference (July 28-30).

The list of workshops is here: juliacon.org/2021/workshops/

The most interesting for me is the workshop on the next generation of autodiff systems (July 27), "Diffractor: Next-Gen AD for Julia": pretalx.com/juliacon2021/talk/review/MJ7T9LXLXNDWHPW9WJN7SGTWU7L9QMJW

All workshops start at 10am United States East Coast time and last 3 hours, two parallel workshops each day; if you don't care about interactive real-time aspects, youtube recordings will be available...

Full schedule (UTC time default, can switch to US East Coast): pretalx.com/juliacon2021/schedule/

Comments

[dmm]

Now about Diffractor. This is a not-yet-released package (but I presume they can't avoid releasing it within the next few days). It's very mathematical, based on categorical things like "optics": see "Categories of Optics" written by a Wesleyan University graduate student: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.00738

But I am bumping into Flux/Zygote limitations so much lately that I hope this would solve all those problems.

The author is a rather famous guy who happens to be a co-founder and CTO of Julia Computing:

https://twitter.com/kenofischer/status/1317961750218706946?lang=en

https://github.com/Keno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keno_Fischer

[dmm]

And this 14-page "terminology.pdf" gist: https://gist.github.com/Keno/4a6507b75288b1fe671e9d1cc683014f

and this video, "Non-local compiler transformations in the presence of dynamic dispatch": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQnSRfseu0c

Now, I am NOT a fan of categorical methods, my intuition works in different ways, but I was torturing myself with Flux/Zygote corner cases so much in recent weeks, that I am really hoping this package would solve those problems and would "just work"...

[dmm]

So, this is released now: https://github.com/JuliaDiff/Diffractor.jl

Here is some of my fresh self-torture with Zygote (it might be that I just need some help from more experienced people): the README here https://github.com/anhinga/julia-flux-drafts/tree/main/arxiv-1606-09470-section3/dictionary-experiments