Vladimir Milovanović of Faculty of Engineering, University of Kragujevac

One of the things that the ongoing Information age has recently brought is reading books on various handheld and portable electronic devices. Novel e-book formats enable inclusion of more interactive contents that is not only generally convenient but is also suitable for engineering and scientific textbooks. Besides the established portable document format (PDF) that presents de facto standard for physical book printing and publishing, e-reader and Web book editions are becoming more popular. This talk describes a typesetting workflow that is based on a Sphinx documentation generator that can produce different output formats out of a single plain text input source code. It is elaborated on how the text can be formatted and how different book elements such as figures, diagrams, and video clips can be built-in with special Sphinx directives. However, the accent was placed on embedding source code into the textbook itself and giving readers the ability of copying and executing it with ease and on the fly. The presented concept is practically demonstrated in an example case of a programming textbook which is made available in three different formats and opens under a permissive license. Automated continuous integration and new release delivery are supported and implemented to allow and facilitate quick and widespread book adaption with the hope that electrical engineering and computer science pupils and students would be intrigued and that their learning process would be more efficient as well as more interesting and productive. 

Biography:

Vladimir Milovanović received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree from the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2010. Since the beginning of 2014, he was working as a Postdoctoral Scholar with the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Berkeley Wireless Research Center, from 2011 he was with Vienna University of Technology, Austria as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Currently, he is holding a position of an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Kragujevac, Serbia. Dr. Milovanović has also held advisory, consulting, or visiting positions with Texas Instruments, NXP Semiconductors, Infineon Technologies, Sony and Broadcom. His research focuses and interests include design, modeling and optimization of integrated circuits and systems, along with the development and implementation of efficient signal processing as well as machine learning training and inference algorithms. Prof. Milovanović is a fan and proponent of free software and open educational resources, and also advocates automation of repetitive and tedious tasks, along the way.

Email:

Address:Faculty of Engineering, University of Kragujevac, , Kragujevac, Serbia & Montenegro