Labz 'N Da Wild 2.0: Teaching signal and data processing at scale using Jupyter notebooks in the cloud

Demba Ba is an assistant professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at Harvard University, where he directs the CRISP group. He and his group develop mathematical and computational tools to elucidate the role of dynamic networks of neurons in phenomena such as anesthesia, sleep, the learning of fear, and aging and to enable more efficient signal representations that exploit the structure present in natural media such as audio, images, and video. Demba is passionate about teaching, and eagerly incorporates Jupyter notebooks and the Python ecosystem in his courses because of the unique opportunity they provide for interactive, web-based teaching of content that has not traditionally leveraged scientific computing resources. Attempting to bridge the gap that has existed between theory and pen-and-paper courses and application- and coding-focused classes, he spearheaded the development and deployment of the JupyterHub Notebook on Amazon AWS cloud for two classes in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. In 2016, Demba received a research fellowship in neuroscience from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He holds a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and both an MSci and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.