CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 26, 2017 — Julia Computing has been granted $910,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support open-source Julia development, including $160,000 to promote diversity in the Julia community.

The grant will support Julia training, adoption, usability, compilation, package development, tooling and documentation.

The diversity portion of the grant will fund a new full-time Director of Diversity Initiatives plus travel, scholarships, training sessions, workshops, hackathons and Webinars. Further information about the new Director of Diversity Initiatives position is below for interested applicants.

Julia Computing CEO Viral Shah says, “Diversity of backgrounds increases diversity of ideas. With this grant, the Sloan Foundation is setting a new standard of support for diversity which we hope will be emulated throughout STEM.”

Diversity efforts in the Julia community have been led by JuliaCon Diversity Chair, Erica Moszkowski. According to Moszkowski, “This year, we awarded $12,600 in diversity grants to help 16 participants travel to, attend and present at JuliaCon 2017. Those awards, combined with anonymous talk review, directed outreach, and other efforts have paid off. To give one example, there are many more women attending and presenting than in previous years, but there is a lot more we can do to expand participation from underrepresented groups in the Julia community. This support from the Sloan Foundation will allow us to scale up these efforts and apply them not just at JuliaCon, but much more broadly through Julia workshops and recruitment.”

Julia Computing seeks job applicants for Director of Diversity Initiatives. This is a full-time salaried position. The ideal candidate would have the following characteristics:

• Familiarity with Julia
• Strong scientific, mathematical or numeric programming skills required – e.g. Julia, Python, R
• Eager to travel, organize and conduct Julia trainings, conferences, workshops and hackathons
• Enthusiastic about outreach, developing and leveraging relationships with universities and STEM diversity organizations such as YesWeCode, Girls Who Code, Code Latino and Black Girls Code
• Strong organizational, communication, public speaking and training skills required
• Passionate evangelist for Julia, open source computing, scientific computing and increasing diversity in the Julia community and STEM
• This position is based in Cambridge, MA

Interested applicants should send a resume and statement of interest to [email protected].

Julia is the fastest modern high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Julia combines the functionality and ease of use of Python, R, Matlab, SAS and Stata with the speed of C++ and Java. Julia delivers dramatic improvements in simplicity, speed, capacity and productivity. Julia provides parallel computing capabilities out of the box and unlimited scalability with minimal effort. With more than 1 million downloads and +161% annual growth, Julia is one of the top 10 programming languages developed on GitHub and adoption is growing rapidly in finance, insurance, energy, robotics, genomics, aerospace and many other fields.

Julia users, partners and employers hiring Julia programmers in 2017 include Amazon, Apple, BlackRock, Capital One, Comcast, Disney, Facebook, Ford, Google, Grindr, IBM, Intel, KPMG, Microsoft, NASA, Oracle, PwC, Raytheon and Uber.

1. Julia is lightning fast. Julia provides speed improvements up to 1,000x for insurance model estimation, 225x for parallel supercomputing image analysis and 10x for macroeconomic modeling.
2. Julia provides unlimited scalability. Julia applications can be deployed on large clusters with a click of a button and can run parallel and distributed computing quickly and easily on tens of thousands of nodes.
3. Julia is easy to learn. Julia’s flexible syntax is familiar and comfortable for users of Python, R and Matlab.
4. Julia integrates well with existing code and platforms. Users of C, C++, Python, R and other languages can easily integrate their existing code into Julia.
5. Elegant code. Julia was built from the ground up for mathematical, scientific and statistical computing. It has advanced libraries that make programming simple and fast and dramatically reduce the number of lines of code required – in some cases, by 90% or more.
6. Julia solves the two language problem. Because Julia combines the ease of use and familiar syntax of Python, R and Matlab with the speed of C, C++ or Java, programmers no longer need to estimate models in one language and reproduce them in a faster production language. This saves time and reduces error and cost.

About Julia Computing

Julia Computing was founded in 2015 by the creators of the open source Julia language to develop products and provide support for businesses and researchers who use Julia.

About The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a not-for-profit grantmaking institution based in New York City.  Founded by industrialist Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the Foundation makes grants in support of basic research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics.  This grant was provided through the Foundation’s Data and Computational Research program, which makes grants that seek to leverage developments in digital information technology to maximize the efficiency and trustedness of research. sloan.org

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Source: Julia Computing