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Monday, June 22, 2015

Reproducibility, Correctness, and Buildability: the Three Principles for Ethical Public Dissemination of Computer Science and Engineering Research

Thank you to Douglas Thain for starting this blog on reproducible research! It is my hope that by bringing light to this topic, sharing ideas and success stories, documenting lessons learned, and stimulating on-going discussion on this topic we can help to pave the way for increasing reproducibility in published engineering and computer science research.

My name is Kristin Yvonne Rozier and I am an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics in the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering and Applied Science. Before moving to UC in January, 2015, I spent 14 years as a Research Scientist at NASA, first NASA Langley and then most recently NASA Ames. My primary research area is formal methods, a class of mathematically rigorous techniques for the specification, design, validation, and verification of critical systems. In our lab, the Laboratory for Temporal Logic in Aerospace Engineering, we publish a website accompanying each research paper and containing the artifacts required to reproduce the published results, wherever applicable.

When reading research papers, and especially when serving on Programme Committees to peer-review them, I am too-often astonished by the low level of dedication to reproducibility in published research, not just among authors but peer-reviewers as well. Certainly there are many barriers to publishing in a truly reproducible way, but I believe that most of these are surmountable and for the rest, one has to ask if it they are also ethical barriers to publishing at all.

I recently examined this topic in detail with another blogger on this site, Eric Rozier; our paper on Reproducibility, Correctness, and Buildability: the Three Principles for Ethical Public Dissemination of Computer Science and Engineering Research was published in IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Technology, Ethics’2014.

Together, we proposed a system of three principles that underlie public dissemination of computer science and engineering research, in essence the raison d'être of scientific publication. In addition to reproducibility, research is also published to show correctness, and enable buildability. We argue that consideration of these principles is a necessary step when publicly disseminating results in any evidence-based scientific or engineering endeavor. In our recent paper, we examined how these principles apply to the release and disclosure of the four elements associated with computational research: theory, algorithms, code, and data.

Precisely, reproducibility refers to the capability to reproduce fundamental results from released details. Correctness refers to the ability of an independent reviewer to verify and validate the results of a paper. Buildability indicates the ability of other researchers to use the published research as a foundation for their own new work. Buildability is more broad than extensibility, as it requires that the published results have reached a level of completeness that the research can be used for its stated purpose, and has progressed beyond the level of a preliminary idea. We argue that these three principles are not being sufficiently met by current publications and proposals in computer science and engineering, and represent a goal for which publishing should continue to aim.

In order to address the barriers to upholding these principles, we introduced standards for the evaluation of reproducibility, correctness, and buildability in relation to the varied elements of computer science and engineering research and discuss how they apply to proposals, workshops, conferences, and journal publications, making arguments for appropriate standards of each principle in these settings. We address modern issues including big data, data confidentiality, privacy, security, and privilege.

Given that it is possible for all publicly disseminated research to uphold these three principles and deviation from them is determined by factors that restrict public dissemination, such as intellectual property, secure/classified information, and time, it is unethical to publicly disseminate work that does not adhere to at least one of the principles of reproducibility, correctness, and buildability.

1 comment:

  1. Kristin, my guess is that most academics would agree at least in principle with this statement of values. But, it seems that our review and publication practices don't reward this level of investigation. Reviewers largely assume that a publication is submitted without deception, and largely focus on the novelty and correctness of the written component. Do we need some additional incentives to look at correctness and buildability of the technology described by the paper?

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