Archive for the ‘Research’ Category

The Struggles of New Graduates

Monday, March 17th, 2008

I had a lot of interesting conversations while at SIGCSE last week, but the best talk I attended was given by Microsoft's Andrew Begel, who spent a year studying the problems new college graduates face in their first software development job. The takeaway: New developers' problems are mainly due to ...

2008 Research In Action Showcase

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

The Department of Computer Science held its second annual "Research in Action" showcase this afternoon; the lineup was pretty impressive: Automated Protein Crystallography (Prof. Igor Jurisica, UHN Research Associate Christian A. Cumbaa) Searching the Sky (Prof. Sam Roweis, Graduate Student Dustin Lang) ShapeShop (Prof. Karan Singh, Prof. Ravin Balakrishnan, Graduate Student Ryan Schmidt) Snowflock: ...

Journal of Visualized Experiments

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Student teams in my consulting course this term have to produce a three-minute video of their work by the end of term: a screencast demo, a recorded PowerPoint show with voiceover, or anything else that moves. One reason I added this to the course is that video clips are ...

Conservation of Happiness

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Two messages below the announcement that Beautiful Code had won a Jolt award was a rejection notice from Google---it seems that exploring ways to integrate new technologies into software project portals like DrProject, SourceForge, and Google Code "...could not fit any of the research directions that Google is currently exploring".  ...

Graduate Directions

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

I realized this morning that I hadn't told the blogosphere what my graduate students have decided to work on.  (I hope the fact that I realized this while cleaning crusty soap scum off a dishwasher says more about me than it does about my graduate students' choices...)  In brief: Jeremy Handcock ...

A Meme I’d Like To Crush

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

Over on O'Reilly Radar, Nat Torkington recently posted: According to a blog post by (update: a friend of) one of the developers, Amazon's SimpleDB is built on Erlang. Cool! Another datapoint for the trend we see towards parallel-capable languages like Erlang and Haskell. "Parallel-capable"? I know the arguments---values in pure ...

ICSE Workshop List

Friday, December 14th, 2007

The list of workshops for next year's International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'08) has been announced. The titles alone provide a lot of insight into what academic software engineering is interested in these days. They also show just how misleading it is to talk about "academic software engineering" ...

NSERC USRA for 2008

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Every year, Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council provides hundreds of scholarships to give undergraduates a chance to spend a summer working with a professor on a research project.  My first programming job was a USRA for Prof. Selim Akl at Queen's in 1982, and many other faculty and ...

Switching to Zep

Sunday, December 9th, 2007

My rant for Computing in Science and Engineering is finished; I've rewritten a key paragraph of the grant proposal that's due on Friday (though it's going to take most of tomorrow to re-synch the rest), and most of the changes "requested" by the publisher of my next children's book have ...

Planet CS?

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

I subscribe to several general-interest science blogs: Nature's "The Great Beyond", Seed magazine's "ScienceBlogs", and a few that are more specialized.  What I don't have in my blog roll is a blog that covers what's new and interesting in Computer Science.  There are lots for computer-related technology, programming, and what-not, ...