The Hacker Within focuses on scientific computing

For many University of Wisconsin–Madison students, Python is a snake and C++ is just gibberish.

But for undergraduate and graduate students working with scientific computation, it’s a part of daily life. And The Hacker Within is one student organization that works to educate students and staff on the ins and outs of scientific computing.

President Katy Huff, a third-year nuclear engineering graduate student, says scientists must be fluent in computation, but most sciences students are not taught how to work with computer programming.

“If you’re training a chemistry undergrad to be a grad student, you learn to use lab equipment. That’s not chemistry, it’s lab equipment. But you never have a lab where you learn scientific computing,” Huff says.

Despite the images the organization’s name may conjure, The Hacker Within does not teach anything illegal. Instead, it draws students and faculty who want to learn more about using computers to conduct and analyze research.

The name comes from Huff’s former adviser Paul Wilson, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, and the advice he would give to students who were reluctant to learn programming or computation.

“You need to access the hacker within,” he told them. In programming lingo, a “hack” is a creative way to solve a computation problem.

In computation, C++ and Python are different languages programmers use to communicate with the computer. Instead of clicking the mouse, a programmer types in a command in C++, Python or another programming language.

Huff is a C++ expert, while co-president Nico Preston is skilled in Python.

The Hacker Within holds several boot camps each semester on different programming topics. When the organization first began three years ago, about 30 people attended the first boot camp. Now, upward of 80 students and faculty members attend the boot camps.

At first, only engineering students came to boot camps, but soon other departments began showing up, from psychology students to limnology students who use computation in the study of lakes.

During the last 30 years professional science has become made up of programming rather than time spent in a lab, Huff says. Most experiments are modeled with computers before and after for analysis, but it’s not just large simulations and pretty graphics of molecules, according to Huff.

“In biochemistry these days, you’re just as likely to spend all your time on the computer as in a lab,” Huff says.

As Huff describes the changing landscape of science careers, a graduate student sitting nearby overhears and pipes in: “Tell me about it!” he says.

Erik Hoel, 23, a neuroscience graduate student, says he spent all Christmas break learning C++ programming for work with his adviser.

The exchange seems serendipitous, but Huff says she runs into this all the time. There are hundreds of people on the mailing list for The Hacker Within like Hoel — students learning computation independently who could benefit from other resources.

“Learning C++ for his adviser over Christmas break, that’s insane,” Huff says. “That’s a lonely job. You need a support system behind you to talk about problems.”

As computer programming has globalized, The Hacker Within has expanded its connections worldwide.

After the Haiti earthquake in 2010, the Red Cross immediately sent out an alert looking for people with Python experience to create a disaster management plan to locate survivors. Huff, Preston and other members of The Hacker Within developed parts of the program, while programmers around the world collaborated 24 hours a day.

The experience also contributed to Preston’s postdoctoral project in population health, a large-scale disaster management plan that could have been used in the wake of the Haiti disaster.

The Hacker Within website also gets hits from around the world, from South Africa to Finland and India. Huff says this is because all content from boot camps is open source and streaming video so anyone can teach themselves boot camp material.

Huff also wants the organization to get involved in a phenomenon known as Random Hacks of Kindness, where a group of international programmers gets together every few months and designs an open-source program with a humanitarian impact.

While the club would appeal to fairly technical graduate students who do a lot of work on computers and are likely the only ones in their office using computation, Huff says the organization doesn’t touch on anything too complicated an undergraduate couldn’t understand.

The Hacker Within has helped Huff learn a large amount of computation tools and has also helped her find a network of friends to ask about specific problems.

“Now if I have a problem I don’t have to Google it. I can ask somebody who knows the answer,” she says.

The Hacker Within meets biweekly in the Engineering Research Building Room 414. The last boot camp focused on developing, organizing, managing and distributing software. For more information, visit http://hackerwithin.org/thw/.

–Gillian Losh