Series of webinars on reproducible research. Episode V. Preserving software by Roberto Di Cosmo

To improve our practice in terms of reproducible research, some colleagues and I organize a series of webinars where we will share our experience and thoughts and on those different themes. These webinars are open to anyone (PhD students, post-doc, engineers, researchers, …) and will be in English (possibly with a strong French accent ;-). The first four ones have addressed the management of a laboratory notebook and of replicable articles, the control of an environment, numerical reproducibility (all materials and videos are online), and activity logging and backing up.

The next one will be given by Roberto Di Cosmo (ENS Paris) on "Preserving software: ensuring availability and traceability". The first step towards reproducibility of experiments based on software is to be able to actually find the software that was used in the experiment. While this seems to be self evident, in practice it turns out to be not easy at all, and the tools which are commonly used today have severe limitations. In this talk, Roberto Di Cosmo will provide an overview of the issues we face when trying to ensure that digital content in general, and software in particular, is properly available and traceable. In order to address these issues, the Software Heritage initiative was started at Inria, and we will report here on its progress.

It will take place on Tuesday 8th November 2016, from 1:30PM to 4:30PM (UTC+1) in the brand new amphitheater of the IMAG building in Grenoble. It will be screencast and interactions during the presentations will take place through written interactive documents (pad, hangout, …). The resulting videos will be edited within a few days for a better exploitation by people that would not have been able to attend the event. All the information are gathered here.

If you are interested in following these talks, you should check on the corresponding web page whether a room has been reserved nearby and, if not, book one and update the web page accordingly as it is always much more fun/easy to learn in company of others rather than alone in a dark office. :)

We hope to see you soon.
Best,
Arnaud Legrand