This workshop aims to bring together scientists and developers working on two distinct but overlapping challenges for advancing software for ecological forecasting: improving model-data fusion and prediction workflows (scientific workflows) and facilitating inter-operability of different statistical engines (inferences engines). The public is welcome to attend the following three sessions.

Janine Illian: Flexible and fast spatial modelling – an introduction to spatial modelling with R-INLA

Monday, March 24, 2014

10:30 AM – 11:30 AM IGB, room 3000 (1206 W Gregory Drive, Urbana)

Janine B Illian, University of St Andrews, UK and NTNU Trondheim, Norway Integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) facilitates the fitting of a large range of complex statistical models, such as hierarchical models or spatial point process models by dramatically reducing computation time.

Janine will discuss how spatial models may be fitted with INLA using the package R-INLA and we will consider a number of different types of spatial models. As a software demonstration, the audience is encouraged to explore the software by fitting some simple models.

To participate in the demonstration, please bring your laptop with R and R-INLA installed.

Plenary overview of software projects, challenges, and opportunities

Tuesday March 25, 2014 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM Excellence Room, iHotel (1900 S 1st Street, Champaign)

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM Plenary talks - Organizers will introduce the scope, goals and intended outcomes of the workshop.

David LeBauer University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Perry de Valpine University of California, Berkeley

Matthew Smith Microsoft Research, Cambridge

10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Overview session software developments Ecological forecasting projects - This session will feature a series of four-minute lightning talks by the leads of twenty software projects that facilitate scientific workflows and statistical inference.

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Scientific Workflow Projects

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Inference Engines Projects

Aaron Ellison – Keynote Address:“Reaching the 99%: making statistical software relevant and useful for ecologists”

Wednesday March 26, 2014 9:00 AM – 9:45 AM Excellence Room, iHotel Aaron Ellison is a Senior Research Fellow in Ecology at Harvard University. He works on food web dynamics and community ecology of wetlands and forests, evolutionary ecology of carnivorous plants, the response of plants and ants to global climate change, and the application of Bayesian statistical inference to ecological research and environmental decision-making. Editor in Chief of Ecological Monographs and co-author of “A Primer of Ecological Statistics”.

NIMBLE, Filzbach, PEcAn, OpenBUGS, POMP, PyMC, JAGS, DART, R-INLA, ADMB, STAN

PEcAn, EcoPAD, Kepler, ARIES, ESMF, EwE: EcoPath with EcoSim, Analytic Web, ROpenSci