I'm at the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments annual summit. Much of what we have been doing doesn't exactly count as research, by my (constantly weakening) standards. However, there was an absolutely great and wide-ranging discussion of Hack Weeks and Sprints and their role in education and scientific investigation. This led to a group of us committing to start a paper on the subject (not a white paper, but a paper). The just-started draft is here, and we accept pull requests.
There were some great lightning talks at dinner time. My personal favorite was Kellie Ottoboni (Berkeley) talking about the finiteness of the state space of random number generators. She (with Stark and Rivest) is looking at the possibility that there are random number generators possible with an infinite state space, capitalizing on the ideas around cryptographic hash functions. She sowed some (deserved) fear about using a 32-bit random-number generator in combinatoric contexts. Since our own emcee makes combinatoric choices, this could conceivably be relevant to our master branch!
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