1,130 research outputs found
A Collaborative Approach to Computational Reproducibility
Although a standard in natural science, reproducibility has been only
episodically applied in experimental computer science. Scientific papers often
present a large number of tables, plots and pictures that summarize the
obtained results, but then loosely describe the steps taken to derive them. Not
only can the methods and the implementation be complex, but also their
configuration may require setting many parameters and/or depend on particular
system configurations. While many researchers recognize the importance of
reproducibility, the challenge of making it happen often outweigh the benefits.
Fortunately, a plethora of reproducibility solutions have been recently
designed and implemented by the community. In particular, packaging tools
(e.g., ReproZip) and virtualization tools (e.g., Docker) are promising
solutions towards facilitating reproducibility for both authors and reviewers.
To address the incentive problem, we have implemented a new publication model
for the Reproducibility Section of Information Systems Journal. In this
section, authors submit a reproducibility paper that explains in detail the
computational assets from a previous published manuscript in Information
Systems
Notebook articles: towards a transformative publishing experience in nonlinear science
Open Science, Reproducible Research, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and
Reusable (FAIR) data principles are long term goals for scientific
dissemination. However, the implementation of these principles calls for a
reinspection of our means of dissemination. In our viewpoint, we discuss and
advocate, in the context of nonlinear science, how a notebook article
represents an essential step toward this objective by fully embracing cloud
computing solutions. Notebook articles as scholar articles offer an
alternative, efficient and more ethical way to disseminate research through
their versatile environment. This format invites the readers to delve deeper
into the reported research. Through the interactivity of the notebook articles,
research results such as for instance equations and figures are reproducible
even for non-expert readers. The codes and methods are available, in a
transparent manner, to interested readers. The methods can be reused and
adapted to answer additional questions in related topics. The codes run on
cloud computing services, which provide easy access, even to low-income
countries and research groups. The versatility of this environment provides the
stakeholders - from the researchers to the publishers - with opportunities to
disseminate the research results in innovative ways.Comment: This article is an editorial viewpoin
Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)
This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software
for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a
description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an
overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of
lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and
challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main
contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and
future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics
including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing
useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying
principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to
research software organizations around the world; and building communities for
software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a
landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group's future
activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups
will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE
community can encourage this to happen
The Planetary System: Web 3.0 Active Documents for STEM
AbstractIn this paper we present the Active Documents Paradigm (semantically annotated documents associated with a content commons that holds the corresponding background ontologies) and the Planetary system (as an active document player). We show that the current Planetary system gives a solid foundation and can be extended modularly to address most of the criteria of the Executable Papers Challenge
Theoretical and technological building blocks for an innovation accelerator
The scientific system that we use today was devised centuries ago and is
inadequate for our current ICT-based society: the peer review system encourages
conservatism, journal publications are monolithic and slow, data is often not
available to other scientists, and the independent validation of results is
limited. Building on the Innovation Accelerator paper by Helbing and Balietti
(2011) this paper takes the initial global vision and reviews the theoretical
and technological building blocks that can be used for implementing an
innovation (in first place: science) accelerator platform driven by
re-imagining the science system. The envisioned platform would rest on four
pillars: (i) Redesign the incentive scheme to reduce behavior such as
conservatism, herding and hyping; (ii) Advance scientific publications by
breaking up the monolithic paper unit and introducing other building blocks
such as data, tools, experiment workflows, resources; (iii) Use machine
readable semantics for publications, debate structures, provenance etc. in
order to include the computer as a partner in the scientific process, and (iv)
Build an online platform for collaboration, including a network of trust and
reputation among the different types of stakeholders in the scientific system:
scientists, educators, funding agencies, policy makers, students and industrial
innovators among others. Any such improvements to the scientific system must
support the entire scientific process (unlike current tools that chop up the
scientific process into disconnected pieces), must facilitate and encourage
collaboration and interdisciplinarity (again unlike current tools), must
facilitate the inclusion of intelligent computing in the scientific process,
must facilitate not only the core scientific process, but also accommodate
other stakeholders such science policy makers, industrial innovators, and the
general public
Artificial life meets computational creativity?
I review the history of work in Artificial Life on the problem of the open-ended evolutionary growth of complexity in computational worlds. This is then put into the context of evolutionary epistemology and human creativity
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