The Executable Paper Grand Challenge won by the DICE Team!

The DICE Team won first prize in the Executable Paper Grand Challenge organized by Elsevier Publishers at the International Conference for Computational Science (ICCS2011). The winning solution was the Collage Authoring Environment designed and developed by the team for the purpose of the challenge.

The Collage Authoring Environment is a system which enables the results of computational research to be embedded in the content of a digital research paper. With Collage, readers of scientific publications can reenact the presented research, validate its outcome, download primary data, study algorithms and browse large result spaces. Collage works by exposing so-called assets, each of which represents an actionable element of an in-silico experiment (such as executable code, input data, result visualizations etc.) Assets can be seamlessly embedded in any external content management system, including wikis, blogs and proprietary publication portals.

The organizers say (http://www.executablepapers.com/winners.html, content from 8th June 2011):

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has announced the winners of the Executable Paper Challenge, a program Elsevier created to address the difficulties associated with reproducing computer science research results. The awards presentation ceremony took place at the 2011 International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) on June 1 in Singapore.

The winners were selected from a pool of 70 submissions by a distinguished nine-member jury.

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Top honors went to The Collage Authoring Environment, whose team members include: Piotr Nowakowski, Eryk Ciepiela, Daniel Harężlak, Joanna Kocot, Marek Kasztelnik, Tomasz Bartyński, Jan Meizner, and Grzegorz Dyk, ACC CYFRONET AGH, Kraków, Poland, and Maciej Malawski of the Institute of Computer Science AGH, Kraków, Poland, and the Center for Research Computing, University of Notre Dame, USA.

TheCollage Authoring Environment is a scalable architecture designed to support authors, reviewers, and end users as well as publishers. The system allows researchers to create papers by combining narrative discussion with snippets of executable code.