Dr. Olexandr Konovalov

Dr. Olexandr Konovalov

Lecturer at the School of Computer Science

News and blog posts

2024

My personal digital decolonisation

15 minute read

Published:

A year ago, I have asked my colleagues to stop calling me “Alex” and use only “Olexandr”, sharing with them an earlier version of this post. Today, I would like to share this story with you. Read more

2023

Software Carpentry for Ukraine: summer project in St Andrews

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Ukrainian students at the University of St Andrews are invited to apply to the Summer Teams Enterprise Programme (STEP) 2023 to work on Ukrainian translation of the teaching materials by The Carpentries - a global volunteer-based organisation whose members teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. Read more

The first Digital Theme Research Twinning conference

less than 1 minute read

Published:

I am helping to organise the first Digital Theme Research Twinning conference. Our objective is to help Ukrainian academics to integrate into the international research network and to find new research contacts. This online event will take place on the week beginning 27 March 2023 and will include invited talks, lightning talks, virtual poster sessions, and other activities. The deadline for submitting short talks and posters is 6th of March 2023. Read more

2019

Which research software is developed at your University?

2 minute read

Published:

The UK Research Software Survey 2014 by Simon Hettrick et al. found that 56% of researchers develop their own software to generate, process or analyse results (see here). It is difficult, however, to find out who are these researchers and what’s the purpose of the code that they are writing. So it may happen that someone in another department has expertise or a wrote a piece of software in which you may be interested, but you will never have a chance to learn about this. Read more

Come and learn GAP

1 minute read

Published:

If you are interested to learn how to use GAP, an open source system for computational discrete algebra, we invite you to come on Wednesday 20th February to Maths Theatre D at 2pm. We are starting to use the first hour of weekly meetings on Semigroups and Digraphs in GAP that take place on Wednesdays to give an introduction to GAP using the Software Carpentry lesson “Programming with GAP”. Read more

2018

Code, cakes and Jupyter notebooks

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Today I will give a talk at the Code & Cake discussion group. I will be discussing the paper Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Research in Jupyter Notebooks by Adam Rule et al., and my talk will be given using the very technology about which I will be speaking. The slides for this talk are contained in this Jupyter notebook, which will be launched on Binder from this GitHub repository. The Jupyter notebook will be translated into a reveal.js-based presentation using the Jupyter extension called RISE. Read more

2017

There is no royal way in computational algebra

5 minute read

Published:

This post is based on my answer to the question “Royal way to learn algorithmic/computational/computer algebra” asked at Mathematics Q&A site by Jakob Werner. The questions asks for a book recommendation, and then more specifically asks whether is it important to have a book focusing on one CAS explicitly; which CAS to decide for; where does the programming experience come from; and how to check the written code is good. Read more

GAP Tutorial in Birmingham

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Jointly with Sergey Shpectorov (Birmingham), I am organising a GAP Tutorial in Birmingham on August 13th-14th. It will immediately follow Groups St Andrews 2017 in Birmingham, and I hope that some participants will be interested to stay for it. Participation is open to everyone, and there is a limited financial support available to PhD students from UK Universities, provided by CCP CoDiMa. Please see this page for further details and registration link. Read more

Software Carpentry: back by popular demand

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Jointly with CAPOD, Research Computing, and Leighton Pritchard (The James Hutton Institute), we have recently run a Software Carpentry workshop where we taught Unix shell, version control with Git, and programming with Python to more than 20 staff members and postgraduate students of the University of St Andrews. The workshop was very quickly oversubscribed, and to meet these demands, we will run another one on May 18th-19th. Please see this page for further details and registration instructions. Read more

2016

Teaching good mathematical software practices at CoDiMa training school

2 minute read

Published:

On October 17-21, 2016 we organised the Second CoDiMa training school in Discrete Computational Mathematics in Edinburgh (our first school took place in Manchester in November 2015). This time it was hosted at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and had been attended by 26 learners representing 11 institutions around the UK. The majority of them were PhD students in mathematics and computer science. Their participation was supported by the CoDiMa project, which covered their travel, accommodation and subsistence needed to attend the school. Read more

Publishing Software Carpentry lesson on GAP

5 minute read

Published:

Following the 2nd CoDiMa training school, I have published the Software Carpentry lesson on GAP via Zenodo: see 10.5281/zenodo.167362. The lesson is based on the problem of determining an average order of an element of a finite group, and finding examples of groups for which the average order of their elements is an integer. First I have heard about this problem when Steve Linton used it in a talk in order to quickly demonstrate some GAP features to a general scientific audience. I have tried to expand on it in my talk in Newcastle in May 2015 (see the blog post  here),  and decided to proceed with it. Read more