Conference: Workshop for Rigorous and Reproducible Scientific Reasoning

The workshop explores a rigorous and reproducible approach to the specification, analysis, and validation of scientific workflows by assembling diverse scientists from scientific disciplines such as biology, physics and climate science, along with researchers from formal methods focusing on logic, theorem proving and constraint solving. Fundamental scientific breakthroughs are key to human advancement in diverse areas including agriculture, vaccines, climate prediction and next-generation computers.

At the same time, science increasingly relies on enormous volumes of data that are processed through software to provide evidence supporting scientific conclusions. Failure to maintain the highest levels of scientific rigor and reproducibility can lead to a lot of confusion and wasted resources. Above all, this can lead to loss of trust in science and scientists among the public, when this is crucial for making informed policies.

The recent spate of high-profile retractions suggests that the process of ensuring rigor and reproducibility is failing to keep pace with the volume of new scientific research. Formal methods, as an area, has successfully tackled the problems of specification and verification in areas including hardware, software, and cyber-physical systems. The workshop, to be held in-person in Boulder, CO, will enable robust conversations to help formal methods experts understand the nature of scientific research workflows while simultaneously exposing scientists to ideas from formal specification, modeling, and verification.

In addition, the workshop will include editors from major journals in these areas and participants from government, as they are critical part in the chain of scientific endeavor.

The workshop’s novelties include a first of its kind meeting between scientists, formal methods experts, and other stakeholders in a bid to spark new ideas and collaborations between participants that address the issue of rigor and reproducibility for scientific workflows. The workshop’s impacts include new ideas that could revolutionize how scientists present the entire scientific workflow from data gathering to the final conclusions in a way that is easy to verify and reproduce.

The workshop is an important step towards ensuring that the scientific discoveries of the future are clearly rigorous in a manner that is easy to comprehend, validate and reproduce independently. This will benefit the scientific community and society by building confidence in our basic scientific research. The workshop celebrates diversity in science by involving people from many different backgrounds including under-represented groups in the conversation to shape the future of the scientific research methodology.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.