Name: Prof. Michael Mascagni
Address: Department of Computer Science and
Department of Mathematics and
Department of Scientific Computing and
Graduate Program in Molecular Biophysics
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4530 USA
AND
Information Technology Laboratory
Applied and Computational Mathematics Division
100 Bureau Drive M/S 8910
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8910 USA
Offices: 498 Dirac Science Library/207A Love Building (FSU) Building 225/Room B154 (NIST)
Phone: +1.850.644.3290 (FSU) +1.301.975.2051 (NIST)
FAX: +1.850.644.0058
e-mail: mascagni@fsu.edu (FSU) mascagni@nist.gov (NIST)
Title: The "White Rat" of Numerical Reproducibility
We explore an application from the author's work in neuroscience. A code used to investigate neural development modeled 100 neurons with all-to-all excitatory connectivity. We used a simple ordinary differential equation system to model each neuron, and this model was used to produce a paper published in the Journal of Neurophysiology. Later a colleague used our code to continue this work, and found he could not reproduce our results. This lead us to thoroughly investigate this code and we discovered that it offered many different ways to thwart reproducibility.This code's sensitivity makes it a very powerful tool to explore many different manifestations of numerical reproducibility. However, this code is by no means exceptional, as in neuroscience these types of models are used extensively to gain insights on the functioning of the nervous system. In addition, these types of models are widely used in many other fields of study.
This
is joint work with Prof. Wilfredo Blanco in CS at Universidade do
Estado do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, and Woohyeong Kim, who is
currently my graduate student.
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