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CIL Town Hall Meeting Questions

14 November 2023

Theme 1: How do we best communicate with and support our users?

  • (A) For bugs it is more efficient to post on github for developer team to fix the bugs. And for small issues, we will post them on discord, for complicated issues, we will meet with Cil team in person (workshop or hackathon)
  • wht about here?
  • (F) Retain recognition; can we gain buyin from companies fr readers-writers; need to ration core CIL development to link work / code parts that has minimal accademic benefit.
  • User meetings are great!
  • Low barrier of entry online events / lectures (15 minute) to introduce new users -> then get them to join Discord etc. Save and publish these as videos
  • (E) CIL for dummies: make a how-to for people who dont know python. Make it easier to find the CIL webpage, youtube videoes, and documentation.

A. How is Discord working for you as a CIL support platform? Should we actively engage users more, such arrange competitions?

  • (D) Discord can be too busy, its not a primary way of reporting issues, a forum might be better idea submit and submit problems. More workshop events would be good, even at a smaller scale.
  • (D) Is anybody interested in a Mantid Imaging channel on the Discord?
    • YES
  • Someone elses answer here…
  • Discord is nice, but hard to search history
    • Would advertising GitHub discussions on the CIL repo from Discord be a good place to store historical questions and answers as questions and ansers can then be version controlled if the answer changes over time and questions can quickly be tunred into GitHub issues carrying forward context behind the issue.
  • (F) Suggestion for YouTube channel how to parts.
    • videos can be great but need to be curated and lot of work to update

B. What kind of in-person CIL events, such as training, hackathon, user meeting, are useful for you? Other ideas for events?

  • …
  • Bring your own data would be a repition of hackathons
  • (B) An advanced workshop or a more topical version, e.g. medical imaging/neutron imaging/etc
  • Training that gives more details on how the algorithms work. With introduction to optimisation, and iterative algorithms (preferably hosted in Manchester :)

C. Do you know about our weekly online CIL support sessions, Fridays 10am? You should come!

  • …
  • yes, but busy
  • Mantid Imaging have regular meetins with CIL already :)
  • I know about it now!
  • No, not before this meeting

D. You can add questions too…

Can we?

  • …

Theme 2: What are (perceived?) barriers to you/others using CIL more frequently?

  • Low-effort introductions: videos instead of notebooks
  • For new users: "why should I use CIL instead of built-in whatever I have always used"
  • windows installation - lots and lots of errors, can take a long time`
  • would like an easy wy to define astra path if wishing to work with dfferent versions of astra
  • (D) Memory consumption
  • (A) 1.lack of programming experience as a material science researcher 2.Documentation do not have enough code examples for all features.
  • (E) 1. lack of programming experience, 2. installing CIL

A. Are there issues with installation and running CIL?

  • Conda can hard
  • Conda (miniforge) works well for us
  • (D) GPU requirements so cant run on MacOS

B. How do people in the community perceive CIL? Easy/hard to use, don't know about it, etc.?

  • People doing imaging do not know about it
  • (D) Can look complex from an non-experts view

C. Which limitations have you met in using CIL for your work?

  • Templates of functions, operators, optimization methods for easier implementation of custom code
  • GPU operators (not ASTRA ones)
  • Non-cuda GPU compatibility

D. Other/your questions

  • …

Theme 3: How do we make it attractive for users (you!) to contribute to CIL?

  • Hackathons! (maybe advertise possible missing features as ideas)
  • Bribery, merch other than stickers
  • (A) maybe more structure colaboration/share-responsibility/colabration projects.
  • Make the first reconstruction 'easy to do' then they may be hooked on the second…
  • (E) offer support for improving code, hackathons, publications from contributions

A. Do you know that we welcome contributions and is it clear how to make a contribution?

  • How to contribute is not thatclear.

B. Which features are you missing?

C. Which features could you add?

  • iterative list-mode algorithms

D. Other/your suggestions

  • User-examples are starting to pile up: maybe curate and group these by theme: "basic inverse problems, applyind CT with real data, MRI examples, crazy stuff" such that new users can easily find what interests them

Other questions and suggestions:

  • … You can add comments here…

A. What are big future problems you want to tackle using CIL?

  • …

B. Your question/suggestion here…

  • …
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