Verifiability in computer-aided research: the role of digital scientific notations at the human-computer interface

Abstract

Most of today’s scientific research relies on computers and software for processing scientific information. Examples of such computer-aided research are the analysis of experimental data or the simulation of phenomena based on theoretical models. With the rapid increase of computational power, scientific software has integrated more and more complex scientific knowledge in a black-box fashion. As a consequence, its users do not know, and do not even have a chance of finding out, which assumptions and approximations their computations are based on. This black-box nature of scientific software has made the verification of much computer-aided research close to impossible. The present work starts with an analysis of this situation from the point of view of human-computer interaction in scientific research. It identifies the key role of digital scientific notations at the human-computer interface, reviews the most popular ones in use today, and describes a proof-of-concept implementation of Leibniz, a language designed as a verifiable digital scientific notation for models formulated as mathematical equations.