Pyomo: Graphs and Blocks

Workshop Recording

I had the pleasure yesterday of presenting a follow-up tutorial within the UT Austin INFORMS student chapter. The tutorial focused on more advanced topics in math modeling and implementation with Pyomo. Specifically, I targeted models on graphs and modeling encapsulation via Pyomo blocks. The presented examples may be found in my GitHub reposistory, and the recording is embedded below.

Thanks again to the organization for hosting me and to all those who attended!

Introduction to Pyomo and Gurobipy

Workshop Recording

This morning, I had the honor of hosting a workshop on behalf of the INFORMS student chapter at The University of Texas at Austin. The workshop consisted of an overview of the Pyomo and Gurobipy optimization modeling frameworks, a walk-through of some introductory examples from this GitHub reposistory, and live Q&A. To all who attended, thank you! And to those seeing it here now, enjoy!

COVID-19 Cases by County in the U.S.

Visualizing Geographic Data with Python

Finally, I reached the end of a rather turbulent academic term and have made the time to look through some COVID-19 data. Better late than never, right? Now in June, it seems the peak of COVID is behind us and almost every state in the U.S. has started to relax COVID-related restrictions. A few states have even lifted restrictions completely.

For my research work, I have recently needed to develop some geographic data processing and visualizing skills. The available tools have really impressed me, so this post is dedicated to showcasing some of them. Since my research is not yet at a stage where I should be sharing results, I figured that COVID should suffice as an interesting and probably more relevant topic. So specifically, this post provides step-by-step instructions on how to produce this spatiotemporal COVID-19 illustration, a sample of which is shown below, using primarily the pandas and plotly Python packages. Note that the full illustration has an interactive time element and may take a moment to fully load, as it is a large file.

Site Update

Migrating Away from GitLab Pages

It’s been about a year since I started work on this site. Unfortunately, I’ve had to put this work on the backburner for the past few months. That’s life. But the good news is that I have recently made some time to create some new content. This upcoming content is dynamic but also sizable. So much so, in fact, that storing the content in git and hosting with GitLab pages is no longer viable. [Read More]

PEP572 -- Assignment Expressions

The Walrus Operator & Application to Newton's Method

This past week saw the debut of PEP572 in the release of Python 3.8.0. A PEP is a Python Enhancement Proposal, a document that describes a feature and requests its incorporation into the Python language. Now PEP572 in particular was about as controversial as they come, so much so that it caused Guido von Rossum, the original author of Python, to step down from his role as Benevolent Dictator for Life and form a committee to replace him. Yikes!

Python Tools for Math Modeling

The 'itertools' Package (ft. Matt Damon & Long John Silver)

This past week, I contemplated a number of math modeling applications for publication here. Ultimately, I decided to instead write about my approach to implementing math models, specifically in cases where Python’s itertools package can work its magic. The itertools package is part of the Python standard library which is itself enormous. Tack on all the high-quality 3rd-party math packages (e.g. numpy, pyomo, etc.), and finding the best tool for the job often requires more effort than simply using the tools you already know. This post is a little bit about prefacing future math modeling posts, but is mostly geared toward expanding your arsenal at a low investigative cost.