ITK Spring Workshop Trilogy (3) @ Iowa University
The final stop of our ITK Spring workshop series is University of Iowa on May 30th. Dr. Hans Johnson was our local host. About 40 people in total joined us. They were mostly researchers and graduate students from Biomedical Engineering, Psychiatry, Radiology, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering departments of the University . It is worth mentioning that the tornado warnings that day did not stop people driving hours to join us. Two faculty members from University of Wisconsin-Madison made it!
Half of the attendees were ITK beginners who did not have C++ programming experience before and were interested in learning SimpleITK. One thing we improved from our previous Montreal and UNC workshops was student engagement when learning how to use SimpleITK in their daily image processing tasks. Luis came up with a gamification strategy by writing five challenging questions for each of exercise and put them up in a simple scoring form on Google Doc to let people compete. This turned out to be a great success. Most people were able to progress well to the very end at their own pace. By the end of the workshop, we had a nice in-depth discussion with the audience on various topics on ITK and SimpleITK developments.
Workshop attendees are teaming up and working hard to score in the game.
On the following day we also had a very productive hackathon event with Hans and his colleagues and students. One of the big accomplishments was a triage of the historical and current JIRA issues. As you can see from the charts below, many issues were closed on that day (the 31th). We found many issues that had been completed, but not closed, were no longer relevant, or had no actions that could be taken on them in their current state. Many issues were closed by requesting the the original submitter to provide more details and encouraging them to provide at least partial solutions to the problems they identified.
ITK Dashboard (Left) and Historical ITK Dashboard (Right) ( Plots provided by Hans)
A happy and productive hackathon team
Despite the fact that we were stuck at the RDU airport the night before the Iowa workshop, Matt drove in haste to get us to the workshop in time, it was a very successful workshop ended in a round of applause by our enthusiastic attendees.
This event was sponsored by The National Institutes of Health-National Library of Medicine (NIH-NLM), The University of Iowa, and Kitware, Inc. We especially thank Hans Johnson for being a great workshop host!