Critiqued Coronavirus Simulation Gets Thumbs up from Code-Checking Efforts. Chawla, D. S.
Critiqued Coronavirus Simulation Gets Thumbs up from Code-Checking Efforts [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Influential model judged reproducible — although software engineers called its code 'horrible' and 'a buggy mess'. [Excerpt] [...] Over the past month, software engineers have sharply criticized the code underpinning an influential coronavirus simulation by scientists at Imperial College London, one of several modelling exercises that helped sway UK politicians into declaring a lockdown. [...] Now, a computational neuroscientist has reported that he has independently rerun the simulation and reproduced its results. [...] The successful code testing isn’t a review of the scientific accuracy of the simulation, produced by a team led by mathematical epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. [...] In May, he wrote in a blogpost that the Imperial study's code looked "horrible", but that such shortcomings are to be expected in code written by scientists who usually aren’t specialists in software development. [...]
@article{chawlaCritiquedCoronavirusSimulation2020,
  title = {Critiqued Coronavirus Simulation Gets Thumbs up from Code-Checking Efforts},
  author = {Chawla, Dalmeet Singh},
  date = {2020-06-08},
  journaltitle = {Nature},
  doi = {10.1038/d41586-020-01685-y},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01685-y},
  urldate = {2020-06-09},
  abstract = {Influential model judged reproducible — although software engineers called its code 'horrible' and 'a buggy mess'.

[Excerpt] [...] Over the past month, software engineers have sharply criticized the code underpinning an influential coronavirus simulation by scientists at Imperial College London, one of several modelling exercises that helped sway UK politicians into declaring a lockdown. [...] Now, a computational neuroscientist has reported that he has independently rerun the simulation and reproduced its results. [...] The successful code testing isn’t a review of the scientific accuracy of the simulation, produced by a team led by mathematical epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. [...] In May, he wrote in a blogpost that the Imperial study's code looked "horrible", but that such shortcomings are to be expected in code written by scientists who usually aren’t specialists in software development. [...]},
  keywords = {~INRMM-MiD:z-PUVEYK6S,antipattern,computational-science,computational-science-literacy,covid-19,reproducibility,scientific-software,software-engineering,software-evolvability,software-uncertainty,sustainability},
  langid = {english}
}

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