Jobs/M2 DV 2014 lisp-statistiques

	Lisp for statistics: an alternative to R
Reference id	M2 DV 2014 lisp-statistiques
Dates	5 - 6 months in 2014
Research field	Dynamic Languages
Related project	Climb
Advisor	Didier Verna
General presentation of the field
Prerequisites	Having attended my lectures on functional programming. Prior knowledge of Lisp and/or R would help.
Objectives	R is a programming language for statistics. Because of its historical development, it has many similarities with Scheme (a language from the Lisp family), but also many problems: in particular, it is a language which is not compiled. The biggest complaint of its users is therefore its lack of performance. For this (bad) reason a number of totally esoteric features have been added to it. The goal of this internship is to study how to port a particular application of R to an equivalent one in Common Lisp. The first objective (which is certain) is to achieve a much higher level of performance than that of the original application. The long term goal is to consider a new implementation of R (or of a subset of R) over Common Lisp, with the intuition that it will result in a much simpler and better system, which is in addition much more efficient.
Benefit for the candidate	Familiarization with a new dynamic programming language (Lisp)​​, and with a language for statistics (R). Note: This internship will be in principle in partnership with a researcher at CNRS / University Paris V.
References
Place	LRDE: How to get to us
Compensation	800€ euros gross/month
Future work opportunities	If you have performed the internship satisfactorily, we would like it to be followed by a PhD thesis.
Contact	didier@lrde.epita.fr