Olivier Dalle (INRIA): “Using Computer Simulations for Producing Scientific Results: Are We There Yet?”

Abstract: “A rigourous scientific methodology has to follow a number of supposedly well-known principles. These principles come from as far as the ancient Greece where they started to be established by Philosophers like Aristotle; later noticeable contributions include principles edicted by Descartes, and more recently  Karl Popper. All disciplines of modern Science do manage to comply with  those principles with quite some rigor.

All … Except maybe when they come to computer-based Science. Computer-based Science should not to be confused with the Computer Science  discipline (a large part of which is not computer-based); It designates the  corpus of scientific results obtained, in all disciplines, by means of computers, using in-silico  experiments, and in particular computer simulations. Issues and flaws in computer-based Science started to be regularly pointed out in the scientific community during the last decade.

In this talk,  after a brief historical perspective, I will review some of these major issues  and flaws, such as reproducibility of results or reusability and traceability  of scientific software material and data. Finally I will discuss a number of  ideas and techniques that are currently investigated or could possibly  serve as part of candidate solutions to solve those issues and flaws.

Biography: “Olivier Dalle is Maître de Conférences in the Computer Sciences department of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (UNS).  He received his B.Sc. from the University of Bordeaux 1 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D.  from UNS.  From 1999 to 2000, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the French  Space Agency center in Toulouse (CNES-CST), where he started working  on component-based discrete-event simulation of multimedia telecommunication systems. Since 2000 he was member of several joint research  groups between UNS, CNRS, and INRIA, working on telecommunication  systems, distributed computing and component middle-ware. He has continuously been involved in the SIMUTools Conference since its beginning in 2008, successively as Program Chair, General Chair, and since 2009  as a member of the Steering Commitee. His current research interests  are discrete-event simulation (mainly methodology support), very large-scale networked systems, and component-based software engineering.”