Jobs/M2 2015 DV Lisp For Statistics

From LRDE

Lisp for statistics: an alternative to R
Reference id

M2 2015 DV Lisp For Statistics

Dates

5 - 6 months in 2015

Research field

Dynamic Languages

Related project

Climb

Advisor

Didier Verna

General presentation of the field

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.

Prerequisites

Prior knowledge of functional programming, Lisp and/or R would help.

Objectives

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

1000 € 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 at lrde . epita . fr> <didier at lrde . epita . fr>