[PyCon-AU-announce] PyCon Australia 2014's second keynote: Dr James R. Curran!

[Chris Neugebauer]

Last week, we announced our t-shirt order deadline (that's today,
Wednesday 9 July, in case you were wondering), our call for volunteers
(http://2014.pycon-au.org/media/news/47), and our first keynote
speaker, Katie Cunningham.

Now it's time for an even bigger announcement:

It is with great excitement that we announce the second of our keynote
speakers: Dr James R. Curran, Associate Professor and ARC Australian
Research Fellow at the University of Sydney.

There’s a lot of people in the Australian Python community who got
their start in Python through James’ activities: He has taught Python
to thousands of school students and teachers since version 1.5.1
(1999), and for over 10 years he has been involved in a wide range of
high school outreach activities, primarily through the National
Computer Science School (http://www.ncss.edu.au).

In his talk, “Python for every child in Australia”, Dr Curran casts
his eyes over an important opportunity to bring Python into classrooms
all over Australia. The once in a generation “Australian Curriculum:
Digital Technologies”curriculum presents an opportunity to teach
computer science and programming to Australian school children from
Year 3 to Year 10.

James argues that the very future of Australian computing is at stake,
and that the Python community has an exciting part to play in shaping
that future.

Aside from his Python outreach work, James is a computer scientist at
the University of Sydney, researching computational linguistics with a
focus on statistical approaches to syntactic and semantic natural
language processing on web-scale datasets.

We are excited to hear Dr Curran’s keynote address and see his vision
for the future of Python in Australian schools. Will you be there?

Registrations for PyCon Australia 2014 are already open and tickets
going at alarming rate (the good kind of alarming). Book your
conference ticket today! http://2014.pycon-au.org/register/prices



=== About PyCon Australia ===

PyCon Australia is the national conference for the Python Programming
Community. The fifth PyCon Australia will be held on August 1--5, 2014
in Brisbane, bringing together professional, student and enthusiast
developers with a love for developing with Python. PyCon Australia
informs the country’s Python developers with presentations, tutorials
and panel sessions by experts and core developers of Python, as well
as the libraries and frameworks that they rely on.

To find out more about PyCon Australia 2014, visit our website at
http://pycon-au.org or e-mail us at contact at pycon-au.org.

PyCon Australia is presented by Linux Australia (www.linux.org.au) and
acknowledges the support of our Platinum Sponsors, Red Hat, and
Eventbrite; and our Gold sponsors, Google Australia and Netbox Blue.
For full details of our sponsors, see our website


-- 
--Christopher Neugebauer

Jabber: chrisjrn at gmail.com -- IRC: chrisjrn on irc.freenode.net --
WWW: http://chris.neugebauer.id.au -- Twitter: @chrisjrn