[plt-scheme] Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for February 2006

Hi all,

This will be the first lispvan meeting of 2006 and it looks to be a
good one! Doug Williams has been working on a "Knowledge-based
Simulation Environment" in PLT Scheme for several years now. There are
actually 3 separate components to his project, the first of which (the
Science Collection) I saw him present back in 2004 (there is a movie
and pdf available of that presentation). He has now completed the
second component (the Simulation Collection) and I'm really keen to
see his presentation on this one as I've already had a sneak preview
of the slides and code! ;-)

In addition to the presentation, Doug will bring CD's with copies of
Dr Scheme and his software so that people can try out things on their
own laptops as he's presenting. He will also conduct a mini-workshop
after the presentation which will be a more hands-on and interactive
means of experiencing the code. So, be sure to bring your laptops!

Here's the "official" meeting notice:

Topic: PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
Presenter: Doug Williams
Date: Thursday, February 16, 2006
Time: 7pm - 10pm (or whenever)
Venue: Think!, 4512 West 10th Ave., Vancouver
Summary: I am attempting to recreate - and extend - in PLT Scheme the
knowledge-based simulation environment I used to have in Symbolics
Common Lisp. It consists of three PLT Scheme collections:

  1. Science Collection: The PLT Scheme Science Collection is a port
of portions of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) and it provides a
foundation of numerical routines for implementing the other
collections, as well as providing data analysis functions. The PLT
Scheme Science Collection Version 2.0, which includes ordinary
differential equations, has been released via PLaneT.
  2. Simulation Collection: The PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
provides a simulation engine for combined discrete (based on a process
interaction model) and continuous simulation models. The PLT Scheme
Simulation Collection Version 1.0 has been released via PLaneT.
  3. Inference Collection: The PLT Scheme Inference Collection
provides a rule-based inference engine and is now under active
development.

In this talk, I will present the PLT Scheme Simulation Collection. I
will start with a simplified discrete-event simulation engine (less
than three pages of documented Scheme code) to show how to build a
continuation-based simulation engine. The functionality provided by
the simulation collection will then be discussed. Examples and
demonstrations will be used throughout the presentation. An informal,
hands-on workshop will be included where we will go through installing
and running PLT Scheme and the science and simulation collections. We
will also go through developing and running simulation models. So
bring your laptop. The topics are:

   * Introduction
   * Simplified Simulation System
         o Continuations in Scheme
         o Event Definition and Event Lists
         o Simulation Control
         o Random Distributions (to remove external dependencies)
         o Example Simulation Model
   * PLT Scheme Simulation Collection
         o Simulation Environments (Basic)
         o Simulation Control (Basic)
         o Events
         o Processes
         o Resources
         o Data Collection
         o Sets
         o Continuous Simulation Models
         o Advanced Simulation Control
         o Hierarchical Simulation Environments
         o Components
   * Future Plans
   * Q&A
   * Workshop

Additional links are also available off of my blog entry for this
meeting: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060201.html

This should be a terrific session - be sure to mark your calendars!  I
plan to record the talk and make it available on my blog.

See you there!

--
Bill Clementson