Seminar by Dr. Guy Tremblay (UQAM)

Speaker: Dr. Guy Tremblay (UQAM)                                                                                                          

Title: "Honni soit qui mal y science" -- A little stroll through science, bad science... and statistics

Date: Tuesday October 29th, 2019

Time: 10:30 am

Room:  EV11.119

ABSTRACT

In recent years, various publications have described the existence of a "crisis" in several scientific fields, for instance, "The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science" report from the National Association of Scholars (2018).

In this seminar, we will present the key symptoms of this crisis, for example, the non-reproducibility of results and the increase in the number of article retractations.

We will also present some of the practices that appear to be associated with this crisis: the emphasis on the public\ation of positive results, the "flexibility", or misuse, of statistical analyses that may lead to some "dubious" practices (e.g., p-hacking, HARKing), etc.

To better understand some of these practices, a small foray into the world of statistics will be required: mean, standard deviation, correlation, data distribution, statistical inference, p-value, along with the notion of "statistically significant result". And for those who don't like statistics that much (I'm one of them , don't be afraid: it will be a short and easy strol).

BIO

Guy Tremblay is professor at UQAM since June 1985. He obtained his bachelor's degree from UQAM, his master's degree from University of Waterloo, and, while teaching at UQAM, he completed his Ph.D. from McGill University. His thesis (1994) focused on the implementation of lazy functional languages ​​on parallel data flow architectures. His research interests include parallel programming, formal specification and verification methods, and their applications to Web services and software components. He is also interested in the development of tools to help teaching and correction. In 2000, he published a manual on formal methods of specification. He participated in the Guide to the SWEBOK project as a Knowledge Area Specialist and Associate Editor for software design. From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the Bachelor Program in Computer Science and Software Engineering. During this same period, he was also a member (2005-06 Vice-President) of the Computer Science Accreditation Council of the Canadian Computer Association. From 2009 to 2014, he was director of the computer science department. In 2010, he received the "Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Science of UQAM", and the following year he received the "Teaching Excellence Award from UQAM".