Embedded in Academia

Author: regehr

  • Review Correlation Again

    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…

  • Red Baldy Again

    With some travel coming up and hot weather rapidly eroding our epic snowpack, I decided to sneak in a quick snow climb on July 1. Since I couldn’t convince anyone else to go along, I made a conservative choice and climbed Red Baldy, whose northwest slopes present one of the easier and safer routes found…

  • What’s Fun About Teaching

    When I started this blog I expected to write a lot about teaching. In retrospect it seems that teaching is similar to raising kids and cooking meals in the sense that these are jobs to just shut up and do, as opposed to writing a lot about them. Even so, I have a short series…

  • Lake Blanche

    Incredible to see so much snow at the end of June; these pictures show what Lake Blanche (at 8900′) more commonly looks like on Memorial Day. [nggallery id=44]

  • Does a Simulation Really Need to Be Run?

    At some point we’ll be able to run a computer simulation that contains self-aware entities. In this piece I’m not going to worry about little details such as how to tell if a simulated entity is self-aware or whether it’s even possible to run such a simulation. The goal, rather, is to look into some…

  • Why Verify Software?

    People like me who work on software verification (I’m using the term broadly to encompass static analysis, model checking, and traditional formal verification, among others) like to give talks where we show pictures of exploding rockets, stalled vehicles, inoperable robots, and crashed medical devices. We imply that our work is helping, or at least could…

  • SLC Sunset

    Near my house the other day. [nggallery id=43]

  • Do Small-RAM Devices Have a Future?

    Products built using microcontroller units (MCUs) often need to be small, cheap, and low-power. Since off-chip RAM eats dollars, power, and board space, most MCUs execute entirely out of on-chip RAM and flash, and in many cases don’t have an external memory bus at all. This piece is about small-RAM microcontrollers, by which I roughly…

  • Embrace WTF

    Most people who do quantitative work, especially involving computers, mutter “What the fuck?” or something similar pretty often. Lately I’ve been thinking about WTF in more detail. WTF is good because it stems from dawning recognition of one’s own ignorance, and without recognizing ignorance we cannot eliminate it. Here I am only discussing serious WTF,…

  • Safe From Compiler Bugs?

    A few people have asked me: Does there exist a subset of the C language that is not, in practice, miscompiled? The intuition behind the question is perfectly reasonable. First, it is clear that there exist C features, such as bitfields and volatile variables, whose compiler support is not so reliable. Second, there exist C…