This was originally posted to Catalyst PR’s Facebook page and is reproduced here to make it accessible to people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

For information on the presentations at Dyalog ’14, see http://www.dyalog.com/user-meetings/dyalog14.htm.

On Thursday 25 September we were in for an impressive presentation called School Laser System with NFC Registration and Alerts by Chris “Ziggi” Paul, Laser Learning Ltd (U.K.).

Ziggi has previously developed other applications in Dyalog APL – most notably an ePortfolio-based nursery training solution for the Childcare company (see Dyalog’s case study at http://www.dyalog.com/case-studies/childcare.htm) which won the Nursery Supplier/Innovator 2008 Award at the Nursery Management Today Awards.

Since then the company has grown substantially and have branched out into Carer’s Careers – a company that is focused on training people who work with caring for others – and now the School Laser System with Near Field Communications (NFC).

The background for the School Laser System with NFC is that the principals are now also working with a new Academy free school. The School has 728 pupils, aged 4-11, and they need to be accounted for at all times during the day. The school is located over two main sites and has an external catering hall and a swimming pool. It also provides before-school and after-school clubs and mini-bus services.

The school “LASER” system is designed as a complete communication and information system between parents and school staff; recently it has been expanded to NFC in order to provide teachers and staff with up-to-date, relevant information. Each pupil in the school is issued with an NFC wristband and tags for their bags and key items of the uniform. Staff use NFC-enabled mobile phones or NFC readers connected to PCs to log a pupil at key points, for example, on and off a bus or at the dining hall. The NFC tags let the lunch staff know what food order the parents have requested each day and can give a full itinerary of clubs and school activities. Alerts of allergies or other critical medical information is displayed when a tag is scanned.

Ziggi showed us the parents’ interface to the system, as well as that used by the staff. The security around the system is obviously very high, using encryption and secure log-in. There is no data stored on the wristbands, bag tags or uniform items. If a child has forgotten to bring their wristband, a substitute – which only works for that day – is issued.

I believe that the system has great potential. There is a market not only for other UK infant and junior schools to implement this applications, but catering firms supplying school dinners could also benefit greatly from using this application.

NOTE for readers not familiar with the requirements for UK school staff concerning reporting, tracking, tracing, accounting for, etc. all children at all times – and who may have concerns regarding “big brother” tracking of children’s movements during the time they’re at school or attending after school clubs, etc.: This system is developed for tracking children aged 4-11. The application saves the school staff an enormous amount of admin. Parents love it, and as for issues around data protection, for example, medical information, no data is stored on the items the children carry around (wristband, bag tag or uniform items). It is already common practice that children with allergies and other medical conditions have their own little poster with their picture, age, condition and actions required in case of an incident posted in the classroom and the teacher room.

This is my final post from Dyalog ’14 – see you at Dyalog ’15, which seems to be going in the direction of Italy (TBC).

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This was originally posted to Catalyst PR’s Facebook page and is reproduced here to make it accessible to people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

For information on the presentations at Dyalog ’14, see http://www.dyalog.com/user-meetings/dyalog14.htm.

During Dyalog ’13, Dyalog Ltd announced an agreement with Syncfusion Inc. The agreement stated that Syncfusion’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and JavaScript libraries would be bundled with Dyalog version 14.0 (see http://www.dyalog.com/news/81/420/Dyalog-Agreement-with-Syncfusion.htm).

On Wednesday the 25th it was, therefore, a pleasure to attend the presentation by Claus Madsen of Fine Analytics (Denmark), where he presented the company’s InRisk Asset Allocation Platform.

The application is written purely in Dyalog and is aimed at professional investors. Fine Analytics have taken advantage of the WPF capabilities and Syncfusion controls available with Dyalog 14.0 to build a generic asset allocation platform with special focus on the professional investor. A specially designed .NET class facilitates the separation of the administrative and analytical sections of the application and a flexible calculation engine that allows a user to define type/structure/order is an integral part of the platform. All assumptions can be controlled from the professional-looking user interface; the user interface can also be used to change/import/construct/delete/add/copy/export a portfolio as well as add new assets in asset groups.

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This was originally posted to Catalyst PR’s Facebook page and is reproduced here to make it accessible to people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

For information on the presentations at Dyalog ’14, see http://www.dyalog.com/user-meetings/dyalog14.htm.

Maintainability

The first presentation I would like to highlight from today’s programme is by Gianfranco Alongi from Ericsson AB (Sweden). Those of you who read my posts from Dyalog ’13 last year will know that I am rather taken with Gianfranco’s approach to software development and, in particular, his insistence that it is a software programmer’s sole mission in life to leave a legacy (in the form of code) that is so simple and easy to understand that anyone who comes in later can pick up the ball and run with it, without having to re-invent the wheel and without risking destroying the application. Work smarter – not harder – is his mantra.

Gianfranco’s talk this year was called Let’s Talk about Maintainability!. The background for the talk is that any professional programmer obviously strives for maintainable code, well aware that an unmaintained codebase gradually transforms from a well-tended garden to a dark haunted forest that requires animal sacrifice if left to its own devices. Far too many systems have “that” piece of code – the unmaintained marsh, the mess that causes nausea and elevated blood pressure. Some people swear developers have lost parts of their souls in there and you can hear screaming if you work late enough for long enough…

During the talk Gianfranco explored some of the underlying mechanics of maintainability, presenting a definition of maintainability based on human cognition and sharing a language that might help when talking and reasoning about maintainability. Ultimately any programmer is responsible for maintaining the codebase; However, software entropy is real and we pay in blood, sweat and tears if we choose to ignore it. He insists – and quite rightly so – that maintainability is economics because the Cost of Change (CoC) goes up and up the longer a projects run and it’s measurable as it leads to smaller margins and ultimately smaller profit. Ultimately, you get to a point where it is no longer viable to throw more resources (more people or more overtime) into the mix, and you simply have to re-architect.

The psychology involved in software programming is fascinating! So is the shift from the days of programmers being proud of their ability to write code that other programmers may have difficulty understanding to a world where simplicity in the coding is the ultimate target – in order to address the increasing complexity in the applications.

Statistics

Stephen Mansour (PhD) has taught Statistics at the University of Scranton (U.S.A.) for the past 7 years. He is also working with The Carlisle Group – a company focused exclusively on creating software to support the fast growing mortgage and asset securitisation industry.

The Carlisle Group’s flagship product is CAS, a Collateral Analysis System highly specialised for global asset securitisation markets and used by participants in all facets of the mortgage business, including investment banks, commercial banks, accounting firms, bond insurers and loan originators.

Stephen’s presentation was named Taming Statistics with Limited-Domain Operators and took its offset in a new statistical package he has developed which is using Acre.

(Acre facilitates code management for APLers and was the subject of another talk today. Acre is available as open source software and can be downloaded for free from http://aplwiki.com/acre).

Asked why he felt there was a need for yet another stats package – after all, there are perfectly good packages available in the market, such as R, and even Excel has 87 stats functions, so what exactly is it that a stats package developed in APL can offer that the others can’t, the answer was: Defined Operators!

Stephen then demonstrated the new stats package by making some assumptions with regards to next year’s user meeting and the likelihood of the venue being over-subscribed (or not) based on a number of assumptions and relations.

The package does take advantage of the fact that R already connects into APL and Stephen ended the presentation by saying that the package is currently in beta. He is happy to share, so if you would like to review/try the new stats package please e-mail (Stephen.Mansour@scranton.edu) and specify whether you would like the R version or the native APL version.

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This was originally posted to Catalyst PR’s Facebook page and is reproduced here to make it accessible to people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

For information on the presentations at Dyalog ’14, see http://www.dyalog.com/user-meetings/dyalog14.htm.

After having spent yesterday in workshops with lots of hands-on examples, today was the kick off for the user meeting proper. The last time Dyalog held a global user meeting in the UK was in 2003, and 2014 has given us an all-time record attendance in terms of delegates.

DNA

My posts from Dyalog ’14 will focus on extracts from User Presentations, and the first presentation I would like to highlight is There’s DNA Everywhere – an Opportunity for APL by Charles Brenner PhD (http://dna-view.com).

Charles Brenner

Charles describes himself as consulting in forensic mathematics and his DNA-View software programme is used by 100 laboratories in every continent (except Antarctica) for academic activities in mathematics, biostatistics and various aspects of population genetics.

Charles used the example of gun crime to illustrate: “Use a gun in a crime and, thanks to recent biochemical advances, you’ll likely leave enough DNA to be detected. However, often the gun has also been handled by others and, consequently, the analysis of DNA mixtures has become increasingly important. The market for good DNA mixture software, therefore, has led me to recent and rapid progress in my long-delayed venture to convert my forensic DNA interpretation work into the modern world of Dyalog. Many people enjoy the scientific aspects of the story and I enjoy relating how, in my view, this project exemplifies the thesis that APL is a tool of thought. I credit APL with leading me to elegant and, therefore, very fast and flexible solutions to a problem for which the competing solutions are lumbered by complicated statistical and Monte Carlo methods.”

Elegance and simplicity lead to several concrete benefits. The first is conceptual development.

Slide from talk I01

“I made notes in APL as solutions to various aspects of the problem occurred to me last year. These brief APL notes ensured that the ideas really made sense, that they worked together and that I would not forget them. The brevity also revealed a simple but important point that others had overlooked: nesting the computation loops in the right order saves orders of magnitude in computation time. For another, execution speed makes it much easier to see the forest in many ways – testing, developing, designing. Competing programs take hours to find a partial answer, then having worked that hard succumb to a natural tendency to call it a day. The APL “DNA-VIEW Mixture Solution” program does the same in seconds, which makes it much easier to think through to the fact that there’s a lot more work to do before the result is logically defensible.” Charles explained.

At the end of 2013 Charles implemented the Mixture Solution and tested it on examples including a set of five proficiency exercises created at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. More than one hundred entrants, including the leading competition, had contributed analyses. One of the competitors (supported by years and millions of dollars of government grants) got four problems right and came close on the fifth, viewing it as a three person mixture although in fact it was four. Mixture Solution alone correctly analysed all five – as a bonus it correctly diagnosed one suspect as a mixed race person.

“We APLers try to be modest but it’s not always easy. Sometimes there’s just not much to be modest about!” Charles stated.

Having now reached a point where he has developed a superior, fast, elegant software solution to a massively complex DNA Mixture analysis problem, Charles ended the presentation with a plea for help. First and foremost he is looking for someone who can help carry on with the further software development using Dyalog. This could be a fantastic opportunity for someone with an interest in forensics, maths, computer science and software programming in Dyalog – “living in the Bay area”.

ELSI

The Finnish Pension System is currently undergoing a reform and there is a strong need to microsimulate various parameters to help make decisions regarding future pension schemes.

Slide from Talk U02

Heikki Tikanmäki from the Finnish Centre for Pensions gave us a presentation of ELSI – the Pension microsimulation model that has been built in the Finnish Centre for Pensions using Dyalog.

ELSI models the statutory pension system of Finland. It is used for reform analysis and long-term projections. In a typical simulation run, they model 500,000 individuals over 70 years.

By using Dyalog not only do they retain compatibility with older macromodels, population and employment projections, they also gain flexibility for modelling various proposals for a new pension scheme.

The model is built in modules with each module running as independently as possible. All the simulation data are held in component files. Depending on the complexity of each module, it takes 10-40 minutes to run using version 12.1 – without doing any performance optimisation.

Heikki told us that by upgrading to Dyalog version 14.0 the model runs 20% faster and the simulation data are now only taking up 16% space in comparison to the 5 GB size they previously had.

Future plans include implementing the use of parallel processors for the computational tasks in ELSI, and at that point in time he expects at least a further 50% reduction in the time it takes to run the entire microsimulation model.

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