Re: Who and where is using octave?

[Steve Thompson]

Here is a compiled list started March 2006.  Someone still needs to
collect all this stuff, format it to HTML, and try to get it on the
Octave website...



I use it at the University of Pennsylvania for some of my
research.

Bill Denney

--------------

I use Octave, (together with MPITB
[http://atc.ugr.es/javier-bin/mpitb] on a 128 Intel Itanium II
nodes cluster) at the Centre for Advanced Computational
Technologies/ISUFI of University of Lecce (Italy) for my
researches.  I usefully use Octave on the above mentioned cluster
(for parallel data processing) where Matlab does not work because
it's not officially supported on IA64 platforms.

Gianvito Quarta

--------------

We use it here in Chile, at the Faculty of Sciences, University
of Chile, for research (myself) and we also teach numerical
methods using Octave and C++ to our Physics students.

Victor Munoz

--------------

I also did my entire thesis using octave, but I was one of the
few people (despite my best efforts) in my department who even
knew about octave. In my field (electrical engineering), most
students are introduced to Matlab in an undergraduate course on
signal processing. If professors were informed about octave, they
could promote octave as an alternative--particularly to students
who want to do work on their own computers without buying the
crippled "student edition" of Matlab.

Quentin Spencer

--------------

I feel like I am living proof of what Quentin has said.  I am
working on my MSEE right now and was introduced to Matlab in a
third-year signal processing course.  I thought it would be nice
to work on my home computer if possible and ended up buying the
student version later, only to find that features such as the
Signal Processing Toolbox were available at additional cost.  I
discovered Octave on my own when I started using Linux and with
some struggles (I liked to print plots by clicking on the printer
button in Matlab) feel just as comfortable with it as I do
Matlab.  But never have I heard any of my professors mention
Octave as a viable alternative to Matlab.  I don't think a lot of
them know it is out there.

Ronald Crummett

--------------

Octave is installed in the server "pandora" at Universitat Pompeu
Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure if some
else apart of me is aware of this. Sad thou.

Diego Ruiz

--------------

At Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, Octave is
a integrated part of a civil engineering mechanics course by Dr.
Andres Lahe (see http://staff.ttu.ee/~alahe/
<http://staff.ttu.ee/%7Ealahe/>,
http://staff.ttu.ee/~alahe/konspekt/myCD/sisukord.html<http://staff.ttu.ee/%7Eal
+ahe/konspekt/myCD/sisukord.html>, it's written  in Estonian, but
the code isn't). He uses Octave for solid mechanics calculations,
introduction to the finite element method and such.  I personally
and professionally have used Octave for the last 3 years.

Radu Prekup

--------------

I teach Matlab in the School of Aeronautics in the Universidad
Politecnica de Madrid in Spain.  All the examples designed to be
identical in both languages and to run identically in both
interpreters.  I encourage everyone to use Octave instead of
Matlab in small scripts when no exotic toolbox is needed.  The
mean programming knowledge in the school is near to zero, this
means that my course is more an introduction to scientific
programming than an introduction to Matlab and Octave.

I also wrote some extensive lecture notes about Matlab and Octave
in spanish to promote the use of Octave.  I talked about them
about one month ago in this list. The conclusion of the notes is:
Matlab has more functions but Octave is a more interesting,
enjoyable and powerful tool.

When I ask some feedback about Octave the complaints are always
the same (the well known weaknesses of Octave)
  -  No GUI (They are *not* used to the command line so they try
     to avoid it as much as possible)
  -  Saving plots is difficult (idem)
  -  Only a few use linux and Octave lacks some more system
     integration with Windows
  -  etc...

I tried to distribute some live-cds with octave among the course
attendants (quantian) but the effort was unsuccessful.  Well,
it's linux...

In the CFD lab. in the same university we use Matlab on Linux for
data analysis (large turbulent channels), no VTK, no OpenDX; just
Matlab.  The general thought is that Matlab is a better tool than
Octave, we can use Matlab... Why should we use Octave? And of
course, Matlab draws the 3D isosurfaces easily...

Guillem Borrell Nogueras

--------------

I am currently transitioning from another product to Octave.
Location: vet school Hannover, Germany

Michael Grossbach

--------------

I used octave and maxima for my numerical and symbolic work at
the University of Michigan Aerospace Engineering Dept.  I
advertise via word of mouth to my fellow graduate students and to
any Professor who will listen, however I receive a lot of
resistance.

Pete Gustafson

--------------

I have used Octave since I discovered it, many years ago, after
having appreciated the clean Matlab language.  I have some of my
students and colleagues use it.  This is not a university, rather
a research institute.

Francesco Potortì
CNR, Pisa

--------------

I teach at Fanshawe College London Ontario.  We have about 30
students a year who use Octave. Mainly filter design, PID,
Laplace and z space.

Doug Stewart

--------------

Octave (w/ octave-forge) is used in an introductory course on
programming, and in a couple of numerical analysis courses in the
School of Engineering of Universidad Nacional de Córdoba,
Argentina (http://www.efn.uncor.edu).

Agustin Barto

--------------

Aside from using Octave for 90%+ of my own thesis work at the
University of Colorado in Boulder, I have contributed to a
project called CISM-DX.  This is a collection of analysis and
visualization tools based heavily on Octave and OpenDX that is
being developed as part of the NSF-funded Center for Integraged
Space-weather Modeling (CISM).  I don't think it (CISM-DX) has
been used extensively in a traditional class setting, but it has
been used in CISM's annual "summer school", a crash course intro
to applied space physics held each year at Boston University.  I
wouldn't be surprised if others more familiar with CISM-DX are
lurking about this list that could tell you more if they just
spoke up.

Joshua Rigler

--------------

We have just swapped our main Undergraduate teaching from Matlab
to Octave with little problem. We also distribute a Live CD with
Octave on, + an embryonic web based calculation package using
Octave as the backend processor, See www-mdp.eng.cam.ac.uk, for
further details and a slightly buggy on-line version.

Peter Long

--------------

I'm at the University of Washington in Seattle and am just
learning about Octave. I hope to use it for some of my thesis
work. I know that the physics department here uses Mathematica
and Matlab and C++ for their numerical methods classes, but they
might be open to Octave. At this point though they are not too
familiar with it. I don't know if any of the other departments at
this school use it.

Theresa Bullard

--------------

I adopted Matlab in 96, coming from C/C++ and Splus. In 97, I
briefly tested Octave, on my Debian laptop, but kept using Matlab
at work. In 98, during my PhD, our Matlab license expired and the
person maintaining it was unjoinable on long vacations. In order
to keep working and to be sure this inconvenience wouldn't repeat
itself, I decided to port all my work to a freely available
language.

My choice boiled down to Octave and Scilab. A few language
advantages (iirc, the 'keyboard' function, variable length arg
and return lists), the GPL, and the feeling that Octave
development was more active and would better stand the test of
time made me choose Octave. I have used it for most of my work
since then.

Afaik, few of my present or past colleagues use Octave - except
perhaps Mai Zhou [1] at the math dept. of the U. of Kentucky, who
maintains a web interface [2]. I will ask for his comments.

Etienne Grossmann

--------------

I have been working on web interfaces lately.  I am in the
process of integrating the UKY code with something to
interactively view space plasma time series.  Here is an
excellent interactive SVG plotter that I am modifying to receive
the plot commands: http://www.codedread.com/displayWebStats.php.

I don't have anything general or ready for demo right now, but I
just wanted to let you know of someone who is interested in web
interfaces.

Robert S. Weigel

--------------

I am using octave at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun,
Poland I am writing software for my B.A. in astronomy, using
octave/C++/Fortran.  There is another person, using octave for
Celestial Mechanics.

Marek Szczypinski

--------------

I found out about J-Sim (Simulink for Octave) some months ago but
haven't had a chance to evaluate it; check it out...

http://www.webeng.org/jsim.htmCheersPaul.

Paul Koufalas

--------------

I think FlowDesigner is a great tool,
http://freshmeat.net/projects/flowdesigner/ But extending it to
use GNU Octave engine, and associated functions is non-trivial,
but nevertheless doable.  Of course its free [as in freedom] and
licensed as Octave itself.  So unlike the J-sim we dont need to
ask anyof the folks for 'permission'.  Also Flow designer is
pretty good, from the demos Ive seen,
http://robotflow.sourceforge.net/demo.html and has some external
toolkits like the Robotflow.

Muthiah Annamalai

--------------

I use GNU Octave for many reasons.  First, it is powerful, stable
and easy to use.  My research involves extensive Monte Carlo
simulation work, and GNU Octave definitely satisfies my needs.
Second, GNU Octave is free software.  It adheres to the basic
principle of giving the user the ``freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change and improve the software,'' as defined
by the Free Software Foundation.  Third, GNU Octave's community
of developers and users is friendly, knowledgeable and helpful.
A quick post to the help list usually results in a quick solution
to a problem I may have.

Power, stability, freedom, and community---some of the reasons
why I use GNU Octave.

Steve Thompson

--------------

I use Octave (as well as Matlab) for my day-to-day work here at
Glasgow University, doing automotive control system design. It is
also a core element of the bond graph toolset "Model
Transformation Tools" (MTT, http://mtt.sourceforge.net). MTT, and
hence Octave, have also been used to good effect for modelling in
the aerospace industry in the UK and US.

Geraint Paul Bevan

--------------

Octave is used in the Fisheries Department of the Falkland
Islands to process raw fisheries data and for fish stock
assessment modelling.

Ruben Roa

--------------

Here in BioControl Medical we use octave for all of our analysis
needs -- no matlab in sight!

We use octave for:
ECG processing
Statistics
Neural simulations
Electrostatic solver

Shai Ayal

--------------

At MIST Technologies, a French start-up developping sound
processing technologies, Octave is the main tool of the research
team. It is used to develop algorithms which are converted in
C/C++ versions by the development team once they are ok. Those
C/C++ versions are automatically wrapped using a slightly adapted
version of matwrap. Doing so, we can use the same algorithms in
our C/C++ only applications and in octave functions used by our
reseach team and so have to maintain onlye one version.

The reason we prefered Octave to other tools is that it allowed
import of legacy matlab code when we started the company three
year ago.

Octave is a great tool and we have only one (slight) problem with
it : the fact that liboctave is licensed under the GPL rather
than the LGPL : that forced us to redevelop some
Matrix/Vector/... classes and to reimplement a couple of
functions.

Ludovic Pénet

--------------

In the context of civil engineering i use octave for signal
processing of measurement data, further as an essential tool for
a wide range of numerical investigations and typical engineering
tasks, as model fitting, approximation, matrices etc... always
trying to avoid the use of M$ excel  ;)

Andreas Naessl

--------------

I use Octave "elsewhere", namely at home on my laptop, for
self-study of computational methods in finance.

Paul Koufalas

--------------


On Jan 19, 2008 3:45 AM, Alexander Verdyan <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am looking for a list of organiztions and univesities that use GNU Octave,
> and what they use for.
> I need this info to show my management stuff, that Octave is in use in more
> then 2-3 places.
> So far I wasn't able to find some kind of list that mentions where Octave is
> being used or by whom.
> I'd be thankful if someone could send me some refernces, or maybe tell what
> he/she is using it for.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alex
>
> _______________________________________________
> Help-octave mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://www.cae.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/help-octave
>
>