The R language and its Dynamic Runtime

When: Monday, October 26, 2015
Where: PGH 563
Time: 10:30 AM

Speaker: Prof. Carlos Ordonez, UH-Computer Science

Host: Prof. Jaspal Subhlok

The R language is nowadays the most widely used programming language for statistical and machine learning analysis. This "systems" talk will explain two main topics about R: mixing object-oriented and functional programming and the internals of its runtime system. From a data type angle we will explain lists, data frames, vectors and matrices, contrasting them with C/C++. From a programming point of view we will explain interactive code development, interpreted versus compiled code, imperative and functional constructs, matrix operators, code vectorization, I/O and building libraries. Based on a basic understanding of the R language we will go into some technical detail about single threaded processing, memory management, garbage collection and main memory limitations. We will conclude with alternatives to extend R for big data analytics including direct bindings to an SQL engine, embedding R code inside C code and embedding C code inside R code. This talk should be interesting to people willing to learn about R or people who frequently use R.

Bio:

Carlos Ordonez studied at UNAM, Mexico, getting a B.Sc. in applied mathematics and an M.S. in computer science. He continued PhD studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology advised by Edward Omiecinski, focusing on database systems, getting the PhD in 2000. Carlos worked at Teradata (formerly part of NCR) from 1998 to 2006, collaborating in the optimization of data mining and cube algorithms to work inside the Teradata parallel DBMS. In 2006 Carlos joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston, where he now leads the DBMS lab. Since 2013 Carlos has been collaborating with Michael Stonebraker, regularly visiting the Database Group at MIT. From July 2014 to July 2015 Carlos was a visiting researcher at ATT Labs (formerly Bell Labs), where he worked on stream analytics. His research has been funded by NSF.