Code Testing in a Distributed Environment Lesson Learned from a NCAR-Academia Project

Date and Time: 
2014 April 8th @ 2:00pm
Location: 
CG1 Auditorium
Speaker: 
Guido Cervone

Code development in a distributed environment is often associated with challenges due to the geographical constraints, different systems and software development practices. In an academic environment, these problems are paired with a relatively high turn-around of developers with different backgrounds and capabilities. This talk addresses lessons learned relative to code testing of the Analog Ensemble (AnEn) methodology, performed at NCAR and at the Pennsylvania State University. The AnEn methodology has the unique characteristic of having been developed in parallel for three languages, R, JAVA and C++. The availability of three versions of the code in different languages provided additional opportunities to cross-test results on different systems and with a variety of data sets. Although more time consuming, the availability of the three versions allowed for very in-depth testing which highlighted errors in the code, and wrong assumptions that were taken at the time of development.

Speaker Description: 

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Institute for CyberScience, GeoVISTA Center The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

My fields of expertise are geoinformatics, machine learning and remote sensing. My research focuses on the development and application of computational algorithms for the analysis of spatio-temporal remote sensing, numerical modeling and social media “Big Data” related to man-made, technological and environmental hazards. I operate a satellite receiving station for NOAA POES satellites. I received research funding from ONR, DOT, NASA, Italian Ministry of Research and Education, Draper Labs, Stormcenter Communication.

I am a member of the advisory committee of the United National Environmental Programme, division of Disasters and Early Warning Assessment. I am also affiliated faculty in the Research Application Laboratory (RAL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). In 2013 I received the “Medaglia di Rappresentanza” from the President of the Italian Republic for my work related to the Fukushima crisis. I received the 2013 ISNAAF award. I co-chaired the 2010 SIGSPATIAL Data Mining for Geoinformatics (DMG-10) workshop. I served as the program co-chair for the 2008 and 2009 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) Spatial and Spatio-Temporal Data Mining (SSTDM) workshop.

I authored two edited books, over forty fully refereed articles relative to data mining, remote sensing and environmental hazards. In 2010, I was awarded a US patent for an anomaly detection algorithm. My research on natural hazards was featured on TV news and newspapers, on general interest magazines such as National Geographic, and on international magazines.

AttachmentSize
File Presentation slides4.17 MB

Event Category: