Remote Procedure Calls are expensive. This paper demonstrates how to reduce the cost of calling remote procedures from Haskell by using the remote monad design pattern, which amortizes the cost of remote calls. This gives the Haskell community access to remote capabilities that are not directly supported, at a surprisingly inexpensive cost. We explore the remote monad design pattern through six models of remote execution patterns, using a simulated Internet of Things toaster as a running example. We consider the expressiveness and optimizations enabled by each remote execution model, and assess the feasibility of our approach. We then present a full-scale case study: a Haskell library that provides a Foreign Function Interface to the JavaScript Canvas API. Finally, we discuss existing instances of the remote monad design pattern found in Haskell libraries.

Biologists regularly construct phylogenetic trees during their research in order to understand the evolutionary history of their subjects. Typically the actual phylogenetic tree is not known, and thus the phylogenetic tree produced is only an estimate. There are two main categories of phylogenetic tree construction, distance-based methods and character-based methods. In all cases, the effects of mutation rate and genetic compactness of species clusters on phylogenetic tree construction accuracy are not well understood. In order to test the correctness of a particular method, it is imperative to perform the study in a system for which the actual phylogenetic tree is known. Thus, realistic and complex simulations in which evolution and speciation occur provide a perfect platform for such a study. EcoSim is such a simulation, and is a simulation

Phylogenetic trees are constructed frequently in biological research to provide an understanding of the evolutionary history of the organisms being studied. Often, the actual phylogenetic tree is unknown and the phylogenetic tree constructed is an estimate. There are many methods of phylogenetic tree construction which fall into two main categories: distance-based methods and character-based methods. To test the accuracy of these methods, it is necessary that the system being studied is one for which the actual phylogenetic tree is known. EcoSim is an ecosystem simulation in which predator and prey agents possessing a complex behavioral model can interact, evolve and speciate. In this experiment, we used EcoSim to test the accuracy of the three main distance-based phylogenetic tree construction methods, when constructing a single tree and when performing phylogenetic bootstrapping. Since EcoSim provides data regarding speciation events, we were able to construct the actual phylogenetic trees from this data. We then performed the UPGMA, Neighbor-Joining, and Fitch-Margoliash methods at various time-steps and used symmetric distance as a metric to compare the topologies of the actual and estimated trees. On average, trees contained nearly 30 taxa. We found that the Fitch-Margoliash method with bootstrapping performed slightly better than the other methods, however no method constructed trees in which more than 50 % of the partitions were correct.

The Universal Parsing Agent (UPA) is a document analysis and transformation program that supports massive scale conversion of information into forms suitable for the semantic web. UPA provides reusable tools to analyze text documents; identify and extract important information elements; enhance text with semantically descriptive tags; and output the information that is needed in the format and structure that is needed.