Reproducible Science And Modern Scientific Software

The 2013 winter school (flyer) will give an introduction to reproducible science and modern techniques for scientific software development. These topics have recently received a lot of attention, and are highly relevant for the whole of the eScience community. 

Abstract: A major problem with the computational science community today is that many publications are impossible to reproduce. Results published in a paper are seldom accompanied by the source code used to produce these results. Even when the source code is available the published results can only be reproduced if run the code is compiled with a specific compiler and run on a specific architecture using a specific set of parameters. Reproducibility aims to make the process of publishing reproducible science as simple as possible, and it has gained a lot of momentum as a desirable principle of the scientific method. Tightly coupled with reproducible science is modern software development. Tools and methodologies including version control, unit testing, verification and validation, and continuous integration make the process of publishing reproducible science much simpler.

The winter school will give an introduction to the state-of-the-art in reproducible science and modern scientific software development. The aim is that participants will be able to apply the learned techniques to their own research. Topics that will be covered include reproducible research, verification and validation, software testing, and continuous integration.

Program: The Winter School starts on Sunday afternoon and ends on Friday after lunch. The preliminary program is shown below.

The start of the week will contain introductory topics such as version control and test driven development. The topics will become more advanced towards the end of the week, including the limitations of reproducibility and advanced verification and validation. Read more.

Lecturers: This years winter school will be given by four distinguished researchers. Rasmus E. Benestad is a Senior Scientist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and author of several scientific books, André R. Brodtkorb is a researcher at SINTEF, Johan S. Seland is the leader of the Heterogeneous Computing research group at SINTEF, and Fernando Perez is a researcher at U.C. Berkeley and the creator and lead developer of iPython. Read more.

Target Audience: The Winter School series in eScience target Ph.D.-level students and young researchers. The winter school starts with introductory topics and continues with intermediate and more advanced topics towards the end of the week. The attendants range from masters students to experienced researchers, and is both a place to learn and a place to meet and socialize with the Norwegian eScience research community.