Tom Wallis

I’m a Computing Science PhD student specialising in simulations of human systems, to figure out whether they can resist unexpected stress. Simply, we build a framework where models of people’s behaviour are written in Python, and then rewrite those models while they’re being run — this makes the original program relatively small, and means that we can simulate very complicated things relatively easily! We use that to work out whether vital parts of human systems still work when parts of it unexpectedly break — this is socio-technical resilience.

But PWSAfrica isn’t about socio-technical resilience — PWSAfrica is about the wonderful language that enables research like mine! Python is capable of everything from clever engineering and complex mathematics, while being approachable and expressive. I am a big fan of Python, I love to teach, and I can’t wait to help teach Python in Africa