Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra (CIRCA) seminar

Chris Brown and Rosemary Bailey will speak at this CIRCA lunchtime seminar.

Chris' Title: East of Eden: Parallel Functional Programming in Idris

Chris' Abstract (abbreviated): There have been various different attempts to introduce parallel programming models into functional languages, from very implicit approaches, such as the par and pseq model exhibited by GpH, to semi-explicit process models exhibited by the Haskell implementation, Eden, to very explicit actor-based models that use message passing and explicit process creation, such as Erlang. Implicit vs. explicit parallel models introduce important trade-offs to programmers. Explicit models give more control over the parallelism, but require much more low-level management (and often more expertise from the programmer); implicit approaches give less control over the parallelism (and therefore often require less parallel expertise) but offer more reasoning opportunities. However, to date, there has been little exploration to introduce implicit parallelism approaches to an emerging class of dependently typed programming languages.
(full version of Chris' Abstract on CIRCA website)

Rosemary's Title: Looking for good experimental designs

Rosemary's Abstract: I have N experimental units available for an experiment to compare v treatments. The experimental units may be all alike, or they make be partitioned into blocks, or there may be rows and columns.

The design is the function allocating treatments to units.
It is optimal if it minimizes the average value of the variance of the estimator of the difference between two treatments.

How do I find an optimal design for my given situation?
1. Find a design that satisfies the conditions of a theorem guaranteeing optimality?
2. Use folklore that suggests that being close to certain specified conditions implies being close to optimal?
3. Use patterns, to find a design that is regular in the sense of looking the same from the viewpoint of each treatment?
4. Use symmetries, to find a design with a large group of automorphisms?
5. Computer search?

Further details about this event, along with information about CIRCA, can be found on the CIRCA website https://circa.st-andrews.ac.uk