Administration

At developers meeting on 2/3 we discussed the following:

• OpenMx 1.2, whose main feature is parallelization of FIML, will be released this weekend. This will allow the group to point to OpenMx progress in grant proposals and allow it to be tested by real users before the Twins Workshop in Colorado. Updates to the user guide will be seen in future minor release of 1.2 or in a separate OpenMx 1.3 release.

At developers meeting on 1/27 we discussed the following:

• The group discussed a bug in the implementation of the parallel joint and continuous full information likelihood calculation. Tim believes he is narrowing down the cause of the bug and that it will be fixed reasonably soon. Ideally the group would like to release OpenMx 1.2, whose main feature is parallelization of FIML, in the next several weeks. This will allow the group to point to OpenMx progress in grant proposals and allow it to be tested by real users before the Twins Workshop in Colorado.

At the OpenMx Developers Meeting on 1/13/12 we discussed the following:

• The grant application submitted to NIH, that if accepted will help fund the OpenMx project, has been successfully submitted.
• The group discussed the content of a grant application through NSF, that if funded will fund the OpenMx project.

At the Developer's Meeting on 1/6/12 we discussed the following:

• Upcoming grant proposals to fund research related to OpenMx.
• Mike Neale is experiencing an issue with the parallelization in the current version of OpenMx 1.2. There appears to be an issue with PBS that allows his 24-core sever to experience an average load of 144 when running certain models. The group believes this can be fixed by reading and setting several PBS environment variables.

At the OpenMx Developers meeting on 12/30/11 we discussed the following:

• The grant proposal to fund research related to OpenMx.
• The group discussed releasing a new beta release of OpenMx 1.2 containing the the parallel ordinal FIML performance regression bug fix.
• The group discussed beginning to diagnos the issue Mike Cheung came across in OpenMx 1.2 fitting a model with one binary variable and one latent variable.

At the OpenMx Developers meeting on 12/16/11 we discussed the following:

• The content for a grant(s) to fund research related to OpenMx.

At the OpenMx meeting on 12/9/11 we discussed the following:

• The status of the grant proposal. Our strategy is to attempt to address any possible concerns or criticisms a reviewer may have. In particular liability concerns were discussed. The group believes that the grant can be phrased with in such a way that what we our proposing is seen in the same light (liability wise) as existing medical equipment such as MRI machines, etc. Framing goals for the grant in terms of a decision tree to address possible issues that become intractable was also discussed.

At developers meeting on 12/2 we discussed the following:

• The group discussed several funding opportunities. In particular opportunities in industry and the Dept. of Defense were discussed. It was pointed out that mentioning on a grant application that the work was being considered for corporate funding could be an advantage for more traditional funding sources like NIH and NSF.

At developers meeting on 11/4 we discussed the following:

• The group discussed Dan Hackett's latest progress with PPML. Dan has achieved some dramatic speedups (up to 30x speedup) for models with fixed structures that allow an analytical solution to be computed for the error matrices and in some cases the covariance matrices.
• The group discussed the changes that would need to be made to the current implementation to adapt PPML to handle ordinal data. Parallelizing several aspects of PPML was also discussed.

At developers meeting on 11/4 we discussed the following:

• The source of the standard error issue identified by Timo has been discovered. The source of the error is a precision issue. OpenMx's numerical solution to calculating the hessian was (0.02) while the analytical solution was (-.04). Because the numerical solution crossed the zero boundary the numerical solution was significantly off. The group discussed implementing an analytical hessian calculation to address this.