Time       : Monday 12/05/2014, 18:10
Place      : Open University, Ramat Aviv Campus, Room 009
Address    : Open University, 16 Klausner St., Tel Aviv
Speaker    : Jan Vitek
Affiliation: Purdue University
Host       : David H. Lorenz
Title      : The once and future R: a language for data analytics

Abstract:
Data analytics is all the rage. This talk overviews the state of the R programming language — a language designed by, and for, statisticians and data scientists of all stripes. With millions of users worldwide, R is a success story amongst domain specific programming languages, yet it is also misunderstood. R is both a lazy functional language and an imperative object-oriented one. It emphasizes rigorous mathematical development, yet it has not formal semantics and relies on unstructured reflective operations. Its design is a puzzle; its performance is a tragedy. After conducting a large corpus study, we have gained a better understanding of the semantics R and of its real-world usage. Armed with this information, we have implemented FastR a self-optimizing interpreter for the language that yields an average 7x speed up.  The techniques we are exploring are not limited to R but apply more widely to the family of dynamic language that includes JavaScript, Ruby, Lua, Python and PHP.

Short Bio:
Jan Vitek is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University and University Faculty Scholar. Over the years, he worked on topics related to programming languages, their design, use, and implementation. With Noble and Potter, he proposed the notion of flexible alias control which became know as Ownership Types. He led the Ovm project which produced the first real-time Java virtual machine to be flight tested on a ScanEagle drone (he claims no one was harmed). Outcomes of this project include the Schism real-time garbage collector and the FijiVM - a production VM for embedded systems. More recently, Jan worked on dynamic languages, trying to make sense of JavaScript and to design a new language called, Thorn. Nowadays, he spends his time with statisticians and data scientists. Jan believes that his 2012 election as Chair of SIGPLAN was an accident; since has been busy trying to rock the boat to ensure this does not happen again. In his spare time, Jan enjoys organizing conferences and sitting on PCs (over 25 in the last decade). He founded the MOS (mobile objects), IWACO (alias control), STOP (gradual typing), and TRANSACT (transactional memory) workshop series. He was the first program chair of VEE and chaired ESOP, ECOOP, Coordination and TOOLS. He was the general chair of PLDI (in Beijing!), ISMM and LCTES. He may still be sitting on the steering committees of ECOOP, JTRES, ICFP, OOPLSA, POPL, PLDI, LCTES, ESOP.

Coffee and refreshments will be served from 18:00
Lecture starts at 18:10