A Survey of User Interfaces for Computer Algebra Systems

AbstractThis paper surveys work within the Computer Algebra community (and elsewhere) directed towards improving user interfaces for scientific computation during the period 1963–1994. It is intended to be useful to two groups of people: those who wish to know what work has been done and those who would like to do work in the field. It contains an extensive bibliography to assist readers in exploring the field in more depth. Work related to improving human interaction with computer algebra systems is the main focus of the paper. However, the paper includes additional materials on some closely related issues such as structured document editing, graphics, and communication protocols

Readable and efficient HEP data analysis with bamboo

With the LHC continuing to collect more data and experimental analyses becoming increasingly complex, tools to efficiently develop and execute these analyses are essential. The bamboo framework defines a domain-specific language, embedded in python, that allows to concisely express the analysis logic in a functional style. The implementation based on ROOT's RDataFrame and cling C++ JIT compiler approaches the performance of dedicated native code. Bamboo is currently being used for several CMS Run 2 analyses that rely on the NanoAOD data format, which will become more common in Run 3 and beyond, and for which many reusable components are included, but it provides many possibilities for customisation, which allow for straightforward adaptation to other formats and workflowsComment: Updated version, taking into account feedback from the vCHEP2021 reviewe

Fragments of bag relational algebra: Expressiveness and certain answers

While all relational database systems are based on the bag data model, much of theoretical research still views relations as sets. Recent attempts to provide theoretical foundations for modern data management problems under the bag semantics concentrated on applications that need to deal with incomplete relations, i.e., relations populated by constants and nulls. Our goal is to provide a complete characterization of the complexity of query answering over such relations in fragments of bag relational algebra. The main challenges that we face are twofold. First, bag relational algebra has more operations than its set analog (e.g., additive union, max-union, min-intersection, duplicate elimination) and the relationship between various fragments is not fully known. Thus we first fill this gap. Second, we look at query answering over incomplete data, which again is more complex than in the set case: rather than certainty and possibility of answers, we now have numerical information about occurrences of tuples. We then fully classify the complexity of finding this information in all the fragments of bag relational algebra