The Digitization of Science: Reproducibility and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Transfer

Saturday, February 19, 2011: 1:30 PM-4:30 PM
159AB (Washington Convention Center )
Scientific computation is emerging as absolutely central to the scientific method, but the prevalence of very relaxed practices is leading to a credibility crisis affecting many scientific fields. It is impossible to verify most of the results that computational scientists present at conferences and in papers today. Reproducible computational research, in which all details of computations -- code and data -- are made conveniently available to others, is a necessary response to this crisis. This session addresses reproducible research from three critical vantage points: the consequences of reliance on unverified code and results as a basis for clinical drug trials; groundbreaking new software tools for facilitating reproducible research and pioneered in a bioinformatics setting; and new survey results elucidating barriers scientists face in the practice of open science as well as proposed policy solutions designed to encourage open data and code sharing. A rapid transition is now under way -- visible particularly over the past two decades -- that will finish with computation as absolutely central to scientific enterprise, cutting across disciplinary boundaries and international borders and offering a new opportunity to share knowledge widely.
Organizer:
Victoria C. Stodden, Columbia University
Speakers:
Keith A. Baggerly, University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
The Importance of Reproducibility in High-Throughput Biology: Case Studies
Fernando Perez, University of California, Berkeley; Michael Reich, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Reproducible Software versus Reproducible Research
Robert Gentleman, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, Genentech, Inc.
Strategies for Reproducible Research
David Donoho, Stanford University; Matan Gavish, Stanford University
A Universal Identifier for Computational Results
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