Demonstrating Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab

The National Convergence Technology Center’s (CTC) recently hosted a “Brown Bag” webinar on the topic of Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab. The presenter was Adam Richardson, an assistant professor of cybersecurity at Lansing Community College, a founding member of the Capital Area IT Council Cyber Security Group, an advisor for the LCC AI Club, and a software engineer on the side. Adam presented an overview and demo of Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab – and other tools and apps – and explained how he uses it.

First launched in 2020, the Brown Bag series offers special topic presentations via bite-sized, 30-minute segments on both technical and employability topics. To date, these webinars have been attended “live” by over 450 people with another 1100 views of the recordings on YouTube.

Next up, on Wednesday January 25 (12:30pm Central), will be a Brown Bag presentation on Robotic Process Automation. Register to attend here.

Below are a few highlights of Adam’s virtual lab talk. To view the entire presentation, visit.

* IPython is now called Jupyter Notebook, which can be downloaded directly from https://jupyter.org/install.

* In terms of architecture, Jupyter Notebook has a user interface and also, “behind the scenes,” the kernel that allows users to easily run different languages and environments. By changing the kernel, you can run Python 3, Java, Scala, Matlab, and Julia, among others.

* Just as IPython “got to a point where it didn’t fully describe all that Jupyter could do,” Jupyter Notebook grew to the point where the name no longer applied. And so, Jupyter Lab brings in new functionality and new capabilities like the ability to debug and set breakpoints.

* The easiest way to learn how to use Jupyter Notebook is to visit Kaggle and look at “beautiful code” written by others. You don’t have to learn this from scratch. Copy what other people do, then work on refining it and learning it.