Software tools to facilitate research programming - Guo, Philip Jia; Engler, Dawson R; Heer, Jeffrey Michael; Seltzer, Margo; Stanford University, Computer Science Department (2012)
Research programming is a type of programming activity where the goal is to write computer programs to obtain insights from data. Millions of professionals in fields ranging from science, engineering, business, finance, public policy, and journalism, as well as numerous students and computer hobbyists, all perform research programming on a daily basis. My thesis is that by understanding the unique challenges faced during research programming, it becomes possible to apply techniques from dynamic program analysis, mixed-initiative recommendation systems, and OS-level tracing to make research programmers more productive. This dissertation characterizes the research programming process, describes typical challenges faced by research programmers, and presents five software tools that I have developed to address some key challenges. 1.) Proactive Wrangler is an interactive graphical tool that helps research programmers reformat and clean data prior to analysis. 2.) IncPy is a Python interpreter that speeds up the data analysis scripting cycle and helps programmers manage code and data dependencies. 3.) SlopPy is a Python interpreter that automatically makes existing scripts error-tolerant, thereby also speeding up the data analysis scripting cycle. 4.) Burrito is a Linux-based system that helps programmers organize, annotate, and recall past insights about their experiments. 5.) CDE is a software packaging tool that makes it easy to deploy, archive, and share research code. Taken together, these five tools enable research programmers to iterate and potentially discover insights faster by offloading the burdens of data management and provenance to the computer.
Submitted to the Department of Computer Science.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012.
Rights: (c) Copyright 2012 by Philip Jia Guo
Rights: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Keywords: theses