Bill Clementson's Blog

DALUG September meeting video/presentation available online

Monday, October 11, 2004

I've held off posting the video of the September Denver Area Lisp Area User Group (DALUG) meeting as I was trying to get the ALU to agree to host it on their web site. They already have a page linking to local lisp user groups and I think it would be valuable to lispers to have centralized access to user group meeting videos. By providing video and/or audio copies of the meetings online, it makes it easier for lispers to learn about what other lispers are doing even if they are not near a location where user group meetings are held. Unfortunately, although something will probably be arranged at some stage, time is marching on and I wanted to make the DALUG video for September available. So, I have uploaded the video to archive.org (interestingly, archive.org also has a lisp connection - Danny Hillis, of Connection Machine fame, apparently was one of the archive.org founders).

The September meeting was on "Knowledge-based Simulation Environment" and was presented by Doug Williams. The video of the meeting is available here. The PDF version of Doug's PowerPoint presentation is here. Doug will be making the Scheme source code for his libraries available on PLaneT (the PLT Scheme package distribution site) later this year (the Science Collection) and early next year (the Simulation and Inferencing Collections).

Here is Doug's summary of his presentation:

I am attempting to recreate - and extend - in PLT Scheme the knowledge-based simulation environment I used to have in Symbolics Common Lisp. It will consist of three PLT Scheme collections: Science Collection, Simulation Collection, and Inferencing Collection. The PLT Scheme Science Collection is a port of portions of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) that provides a foundation for inplementing the other collections as well as providing data analysis functions. The PLT Scheme Science Collection is largely implemented. The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection provides a discrete-event simulation engine based on a process interaction model. The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection has been prototyped. The PLT Scheme Inferencing Collection provides a rule-based inferencing engine.

In this talk, I will present the PLT Scheme Science Collection as well as discussion how to use - and extend - PLoT Scheme for data analysis.

• PLT Scheme Science Collection
  • Mathematical Functions
  • Special Functions
  • Random Number Generation
  • Random Distributions
  • Statistics
  • Histograms
  • Chebyshev Approximations
• Using PLoT Scheme
  • PLoT Scheme Overvire
  • Extending PLoT Scheme
  • Histogram Plot
  • Step Plot
• Future Plans
  • PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
  • PLT Scheme Inferencing Collection
• Demo and Q&A