Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

Game-Changing Results

Monday, December 1st, 2008

As reported earlier, the Computing Community Consortium asked people to submit "game-changing advances" from computer research. Results are now up on their site, and include: The Internet and the World Wide Web Search technology Cluster computing The transformation of science via computation Secure communication Mobile computing Expert systems Everyday robotics Digital media Mapping & navigation Recommendation systems Still nothing from software engineering, ...

How Come I Didn’t Know About FLOSSmole?

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Via Jordi Cabot, a link to a SourceForge project called FLOSSmole that collates tons of information about open source projects to support empirical software engineering research.  Very cool.

Quote Game Changing End Quote

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

The Computing Community Consortium's blog has a post today asking for help identifying game-changing research in computer science.  I honestly can't think of anything from software engineering that's had the same kind of impact as the Web, search, cluster computing, or their other choices so far...

CfP: Web 2.0 Tools for Research Scientists

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Via Science in the Open, a call for expressions of interest in running a research project on how Web 2.0 tools are changing scientific practice. Given the timelines (EoI's on November 3, project to start in December) it'll be hard to get a proposal in, but it'll be interesting to ...

The Thesis Hat

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

One of my new grad students just mailed this around: In the interest of fostering a better, more closely connected learning community with a vested interest in the academic well-being of all participants, I have installed a new device in my cubicle.  This device shall be known as the Thesis Hat.  ...

We Should Have Built This For Them

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

One Big Lab has a short review of LabMeeting.com, a tool to help PhD students organize papers they've read, discover new ones, share lab procedures, and so on.  It was built by physics students; similar systems, like Ologeez and OpenWetWare, were built by geneticists and cell biologists respectively.  I can't ...

Interesting Tools

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

WikidBASE is a database that can be shaped using wiki syntax.  The video is a bit long, but worth watching; there are obvious applications to DrProject's new ticketing system. Replay Solutions has a "capture and playback" debugging tool --- this interview in Doctor Dobb's Journal gives details, and this short video ...

Fell at the First Hurdle

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

My most recent grant proposal was shot down in its first review. Yes, I know, the competition for NSERC funding is increasingly fierce, but dammit, this would have helped a lot of scientists do a lot of good research, and I'm willing to bet that the ones that are finally ...

Recent Research Reading

Friday, June 20th, 2008

I really did mean to blog more regularly about the research papers I'm reading... Oh well---here are the highlights from the last three months; together, they represent about 25% of what I've actually read. I haven't bothered hyperlinking, since many of them are behind paywalls, and the rest ...

Where My Grad Students Are

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

I've been blogging about undergrad projects pretty regularly, but not about the progress my graduate students have been making.  In brief: Samira is using Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to group events in a project's history (email messages, ticket changes, repository check-ins, etc.) into larger-scale events so that they'll be easier for ...