This year my contribution to the AGU fall meeting 2013 was all about the development of Open Source Software to enable the reproducibility of scientific products, with both a Poster and an Oral presentation. The AGU was the perfect opportunity to share my ideas on a topic that is one of my main interests.
This was my 2nd time at AGU, but my first time with an oral presentation which turned in a real challenge!
The main issue was a combination of 2 factors : I had decided to generate the slideshow in realtime as HTML from an online IPython Notebook. I thought it would be cool to show this functionality, as well as the work itself. Unfortunately, I was dependent on an internet connection at the time of the presentation, but alas, at AGU the presenter computer doesn’t have internet connection! Definitely not the best conditions for a web based slideshow generated “on-the-fly” by the execution of an IPython Notebook.
I found out about the lack of connectivity only 2 days before my presentation. I must have misunderstood the AGU oral presentation guidelines, but when I didn’t find an explicit mention of the lack of an internet connection, I took it for granted that that wouldn’t be an issue. Big mistake!
I decided it would be safer to prepare a power-point presentation, and some time later, I had one. Deep breath; I would be safe. But… what a disappointment !
I was so excited about the idea of showing my work running in realtime instead of showing a static (somewhat boring) ppt presentation!!!
I kept thinking about alternative solutions, though, and an idea quickly came to me. If the lack of internet stands in the way of an interactive, realtime demo there should be no problem in running a static HTML slideshows instead; at least that is what I thought …
I used the IPython “nbconvert” utility and its “convert to slide” option, and I successfully converted my workflow from an interactive IPython notebook running in slideshow mode to a static HTML5 slideshows, yeah! The audience wouldn’t get to see how this was done, but at least they would get to see the result.
Happy with the final HTML presentation I finally went to the “AGU’s Speaker Ready Room” to upload and test my presentation. Unfortunately, my HTML presentation would not run offline. The lack of internet was giving me troubles with missing JavaScript files, missing fonts, images-urls to be replaced with path to static files, broken hyperlinks etc … it was not as easy as I thought.
It took more than 3 hours to fix all the bugs on account of a really slow internet connection running from my phone, but finally i got my presentation perfectly running off line on the AGU computers !
In the end, my talk ran very smoothly. A complete workflow for “catchments characterization” using exclusively open source software, running online and fully reproducible thanks to the use of open source software and an open dataset! I felt really good, as I think I successfully got my message across, both in words and in actions.
To top it all off, my presentation came just at the right time. Before me, two other presentations during my session had mentioned the use of the IPython Notebook as open source software tool to enable reproducibility of scientific work. They had highlighted that it shows great potential and that it deserves further investigation. I think my presentation gave them even more proof of that! Even the chairman acknowledged this when he stated: “Before we heard about it, but now we saw it in action!” I felt very proud of what I had done. The effort I put into running the HTML slideshow definitely paid off!!!
