SIERRA: A Modular Framework for Research Automation and Reproducibility

TL;DR

SIERRA is a modular framework that automates experiment generation, execution, and result processing to accelerate research and enhance reproducibility across diverse environments and platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a declarative, modular framework that automates research workflows, reducing manual effort and improving reproducibility in intelligent systems research.

Findings

Automates experiment generation, execution, and result processing.

Enables exact replication across different environments and platforms.

Reduces manual configuration and scripting for researchers.

Abstract

Modern intelligent systems researchers form hypotheses about system behavior and then run experiments using one or more independent variables to test their hypotheses. We present SIERRA, a novel framework structured around that idea for accelerating research development and improving reproducibility of results. SIERRA accelerates research by automating the process of generating executable experiments from queries over independent variables(s), executing experiments, and processing the results to generate deliverables such as graphs and videos. It shifts the paradigm for testing hypotheses from procedural ("Do these steps to answer the query") to declarative ("Here is the query to test--GO!"), reducing the burden on researchers. It employs a modular architecture enabling easy customization and extension for the needs of individual researchers, thereby eliminating manual configuration and processing via throw-away scripts. SIERRA improves reproducibility of research by providing automation independent of the execution environment (HPC hardware, real robots, etc.) and targeted platform (arbitrary simulator or real robots). This enables exact experiment replication, up to the limit of the execution environment and platform, as well as making it easy for researchers to test hypotheses in different computational environments.