The once and future R: a language for data analytics
Prof. Jan Vitek, Purdue
TIME 2nd June, 11:00
ROOM 308
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. It’s design is a puzzle; it’s 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.
Biography
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.
Jan will spend part of 2nd June at IC. Please let me know if you want to talk with him.
Sophia