This post is about a tiny thing that makes a big difference in practice because I spend so much time writing. Usually, people compose paragraphs as monolithic blocks of text. For several years now, I’ve written paragraphs like this: Integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs are difficult to track down and may lead [...]
Following up on my previous post, here is a list of some professional advice I received as an assistant professor: Wear nicer shoes. Stop being flighty. Work on the same thing for about 20 years in order to become famous as “the person who does that.” Be at least gold medallion or equivalent on some [...]
Today FCS posted some great advice for new professors, reminding me that I had a collection of notes on this topic: Follow Patterson’s advice. Across your research projects, make sure there is potential for both short-term and long-term payoff. Understand your institution’s retention, promotion, and tenure policies. More importantly, understand what is being left unsaid [...]
The other day I posted about a simple, low-effort way to improve the bug-finding performance of a random tester. We now have a draft paper about this topic, it’s joint work between my group at Utah and Alex Groce’s group at Oregon State. The key claim is: … for realistic systems, randomly excluding some features [...]
Yesterday someone in my department’s main office got a request from a student to receive credit for taking the now-infamous free online AI course from Stanford. It is routine for a university to award transfer credit for a course taken at a different school, but this case is trickier since a student taking the AI [...]
Sharing research papers on the web is not very controversial because sharing benefits everyone (other than a few increasingly irrelevant special interests). Sharing research proposals is a thornier proposition: since the work remains to be done, it exposes researchers to scooping. However, I would argue that scooping is not really very likely, and anyone whose [...]
[Yesterday I submitted a proposal to Google for a modest amount of money to work on turning large random programs that expose compiler flaws into concise bug reports. Below is a transcription that is mostly faithful (citations are omitted and I changed the example bug report from a floating figure into inline text). Feedback is [...]
Earlier this week I gave one of the keynote talks at ISSTA, the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis. A year ago Matt Dwyer, the general chair, sent me the following invitation: I would like to invite you to give a keynote talk to the meeting about the challenges in testing, dynamic and static [...]
On his blog today, Bertrand Meyer responded to a soon-to-appear paper that criticizes some of his previous work. Frank, open debates about the merits of various research approaches and results are important and yet, for various reasons, the vast majority of these debates are hidden inside program committee meetings, hallway discussions, reading groups, and (to [...]
Not long ago I was surprised to find that there was a (slightly) negative correlation between my review scores and the average of the other reviewers’ scores for a collection of papers submitted to a conference. A few days ago I attended the program committee meeting for SenSys 2011, where I again reviewed around 20 [...]