Luis Ibáñez works as Senior Software Engineer at Google Inc in Chicago. Opinions expressed in this site are his own.You can find him in github at: http://www.github.com/luisibanezand in twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/luisibanezHe previously worked as a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA). At Kitware he was closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK).Luis is a strong supporter of Open Access, and one of the editors of the Insight Journal, an OA Journal that enforces the verification of reproducibility. In collaboration with other instructors, Luis taught a course on Open Source Software Practices at RPI between 2007 and 2013, and also at the State University of New York at Albany between 2011 and 2014.Luis Ibáñez received a B.S. in Physics from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) in 1989 and a M.S. in Optics from the same university in 1994. He received a D.E.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Universite de Rennes I (Rennes, France) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. In 1999, Luis Ibáñez joined the Division of Neurosurgery of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and participated as a member of the MIDAG and CADDLab groups. His work at UNC was related to the development of algorithms for 2 and 3D registration applied to image guided surgery. He also participated as developer of the INSIGHT Registration and Segmentation Toolkit sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware, Inc. in February 2002 where he was one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) coordinating its maintenance with other developers and the user community; he is also one of the main developers of the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and participated in crafting the operational principles of the Insight Journal. Luis Ibáñez is a strong supporter of Open Access, and the verification of reproducibility in scientific publications and is a regular speaker in ITK training courses, and in events disseminating the principles of Open Source. In August 2014, Luis joined Google Inc as Software Engineer, to work with the corporate engineering team in New York city.
Authored Comments
Barry,
You make an excellent point, and I fully agree with you.
One of the main roots of the problem is that Reproducibility is not formal part of the Ph.D. training. As incredible as it may sound, researchers in training do not get to be educated in the fundamentals of the scientific method. Very few of them go through a format class on epistemology or a course on experimental design.
Instead they get the informal mis-education on the "Publish or Perish" misguided and corrupt culture, which only serves the business model of publishers, and doesn't returns at all on the economic investment that society at large makes on scientific research. Graduate students learn about this corrupt practice of "you must publish...or else", as free "career advice" given by well-intentioned but misguided mentors and peers. This feeds into a vicious cycle in which personal and institution reputation is cultivated as a way of securing future research funding.
There is a Reproducible Research movement working hard on raising awareness about this disconnection, and developing tools for bringing back reproducibility in to the mainstream practice of scientific research.
For example, this month's issue of IEEE Computer is dedicated to
"Reproducible Research"
http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/358
http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/cs/2012/04/mcs2012040011-abs.html
Most conferences and journals do not have requirements of reproducibility verification as part of their review process. They are, as most of the academic publishing field, obsessed with "Novelty" (they confused themselves with the Patent office), and pay little attention to whether the content of publications is real and whether it works at all or not. (See the recent scandal on Fraud in scientific publications: http://www.anesth.or.jp/english/pdf/news20120629.pdf, where a researcher managed to fabricate 172 papers...)
The two critical elements to get out of this sad situation are:
a) Educating the next generation of researchers on the true practice of the Scientific Method.
b) Making open tools available for them to easily incorporate reproducibility in their daily work.
The Requirement for Reproducible research, leads by necessity to Open Science (open data, open source software, open access publications), since the first thing that an independent group needs in order to verify the reproducibility of published work, is access to the data, software, parameters, and reports that fully describe the work presented in a paper.
Here are two interesting talks by Victoria Stodden on these issues:
"Reproducible Research: A Digital Curation Agenda"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ-UxoiGSJM
"Open Science Summit Keynote 2011"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZIxzTsvWhw&feature=relmfu
It has been said that Open Source is the application of the scientific method to the field of software engineering. Curiously, the time has come for Open Source communities to give back to scientific research, and help restore the rightful place of Reproducibility in science.
Very nice article Polly,
I find fascinating the approach of SEMCO, since reading about it in the MacroWikinomics book.
From the many interesting points that you mention, I think the one that is the hardest for current organizations (and even for many of us) is the notion of "Relentlessly relinquish control". Even when we know it is the right thing to do, in order to unleash creativity, there is that fear generated by the uncertainty of whether things will still happen if we are not there with our illusion to control them.
Curiously, it tends to happen that when we relinquish control, those planned things do not actually happen, and instead more interesting, innovative and productive ones emerge to take their place.
The economic success of SEMCO is convincing proof that it is good business to let people find passion in their jobs.
SEMCO's web site is an interesting place to visit.
I love their "Out of your mind Committee":
http://www.semco.com.br/en/content.asp?content=4&contentID=604
Thanks for your interesting article.