Daniele de Rigo

Mastrave is a free software library written to perform vectorized scientific computing and to be as compatible as possible with both GNU Octave and Matlab computing frameworks, offering general purpose, portable and freely available features for the scientific community. Mastrave is mostly oriented ... [More] to ease complex modelling tasks such as those typically needed within environmental models, even when involving irregular and heterogeneous data series. . Semantic array programming The Mastrave project attempts to allow a more effective, quick interoperability between GNU Octave and Matlab users by using a reasonably well documented wrap around the main incompatibilities between those computing environments and by promoting a reasonably general idiom based on their common, stable syntagms. It also promotes the systematic adoption of data-transformation abstractions and lightweight semantic constraints to enable concise and reliable implementations of models following the paradigm of semantic array programming. There are a couple of underlying ideas: library design is language design and vice versa (Bell labs); language notation is definitely a "tool of thought" (Iverson), in the sense that there is a feedback between programming/mathematical notation and the ability to think new scientific insights. And perhaps ethic ones. . Science and society Mastrave is free software, which is software respecting your freedom. As many other free scientific software packages, it is offered to the scientific community to also promote the development of a free society more concerned about cooperation rather than competitiveness, heading toward knowledge and culture freedom. Such a vision implies the possibility for motivated individuals to freely access, review and contribute even to the cutting-edge academic culture. This possibility relies on the development of tools and methodologies helping to overcome economic, organizational and institutional barriers (i.e. knowledge oligopolies) while systematically promoting reproducible research. This is a long-term goal to which the free software paradigm can and has been able to actively cooperate. Copyright (C) 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Daniele de Rigo Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. [Less]

Supporting actors involved in water resources management TwoLe Planning Engine is GNU GPLv3-covered free software for supporting Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It provides advanced optimization (stochastic dynamic programming) and simulation engines suitable to allow Decision ... [More] Support Systems (DSS) to explore water management policies for multi-criteria water planning. The provided optimization and simulation algorithms enable the design and evaluation of water management policies even for multipurpose reservoir networks under different scenarios and goals. Such kind of mathematical support may be of great importance to allow the actors (stakeholders, decision makers, domain-experts) which are involved in the IWRM problem to move from the complexity of the IWRM modeling to the complexity of the decision problem, relying on automatic tools to explore different scenarios and goals while focusing on the effects of different water management policies. On the other hand, publicly available software for supporting IWRM decision-making can be viewed as a transparency prerequisite to provide involved actors the ability to understand the implications of the technical apparatus on decision-making and to mitigate unwanted technology-driven biases. The transparency requirements can be articulated in the very basic demand to be able to freely run the software and to study its complete and non-vague formulation (which needs the public availability of the source code) and in the possibility to correct and improve the software and release improvements to the public. Even if such possibility is usually exploitable only by competent researchers, its importance is vital to raise IWRM actors awareness about the intrinsic fallibility of technical apparatuses and to ensure them the maximum degree of dependability in relying on such software, which is achievable allowing and promoting the maximum degree of public verifiability. These requirements are satisfied only by free software, because the definition of free software is equivalent to them. This is an excerpt of the TwoLe Planning Engine presentation you can find at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/twole-plan Please refer to that URL to learn about other important aspects of TwoLe Planning Engine. Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 Daniele de Rigo [Less]