Statistics Seminar
| Date/Time: | Monday, 14 Oct 2013 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm |
|---|---|
| Location: | Snedecor 3105 |
| Cost: | Free |
| URL: | www.stat.iastate.edu |
| Contact: | Main Office |
| Phone: | 515-294-3440 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Categories: | Lectures |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
Experiments are useful in advancement of science and it is important that experiments be repeatable. Whereas repeatability of experiments is well understood in fields such as Physics, Chemistry, and Biology; this, surprising it may seem, is not true of computer software and consequently of fields where some components of experiments are rooted in software.
We define an experiment as some step-by-step outer activity that helps us understand, verify, or demonstrate the inner constitution, mechanism, and properties of an object system. The object systems and nature of experiments on them vary from one scientific community to another. Our object systems are software systems including databases. CyRES (Cyclone Workbench for Repeatable Experiments ) is a workbench for experiments. An experiment in CyRES consists of commands on multiple software systems. Commands can be thought of as the counterpart of assignment statements from general-purpose programming languages. The commands, when executed, participate within runtime environment of CyRES consisting of variables, artifacts such as xml-based log files, internal page-based storage, internal files in the storage, and external files under the operating system.
The overriding goal of experiments in CyRES is their repeatability. In our view repeatability is largely a practice oriented issue. Our hypothesis is that in order for experiments to be repeatable in practice, they must have uninhibited opportunity to be comprehensive, self-contained, clear, and settings surrounding them be easily reconfigurable. In addition to these features, CyRES also facilitates implementation of software systems, such as databases, where page accesses are deemed to be basic building blocks.
The talk will consist of an introduction to CyRES with demos as focal point where R plays a very useful role.