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You Might as Well Be a Great Copy Editor
An early draft of a paper, blog post, grant proposal, or other piece of technical writing typically has many problems. Some of these are high-level issues, such as weak motivation, sections in the wrong order, or a key description that is difficult to understand because it lacks an accompanying figure. These problems need to be…
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It’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel
Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis has long been one of my favorites. It promotes the view that operating systems can be much more efficient than then-current operating systems via runtime code generation, lock-free synchronization, and fine-grained scheduling. In this piece we’ll only look at runtime code generation, which can be cleanly separated from the other…
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Walking or Biking to NSF
Since the National Science Foundation funds a large fraction of academic computer science research in the USA, we often end up traveling to Washington to visit the NSF. This post is just to say that if you are traveling light, if you need some exercise, if you have a bit of free time, and if the…
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Paths to External Engagement in Computer Science Research
The other day I wrote a post imploring academic computer scientists to at least occasionally break out of their research bubbles and engage with real engineering problems where their research matters. That post was, admittedly, a bit facile about how one might make this engagement happen. This piece suggests some ways. I don’t claim any…
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Closing the Loop: The Importance of External Engagement in Computer Science Research
Computer scientists tend to work by separating the essence of a problem from its environment, solving it in an abstract form, and then figuring out how to make the abstract solution work in the real world. For example, there is an enormous body of work on solving searching and sorting problems and in general it…
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Trust Boundaries in Software Systems
One of the big things that has changed in computer science education over the last 20 years is that it is now mandatory to prepare students for writing software that lives in a hostile environment. This content can’t be limited to a computer security course, it has to be spread throughout the curriculum. My experience,…
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Stories Behind Papers: Integer Overflow
A couple months ago Jean Yang and Vijay Chidambaram had a Twitter discussion about the stories behind research efforts that you might hear over coffee, but that usually don’t get written up. Vijay started a series of posts containing these. I thought I’d write up a couple of them myself. Alas, none will be particularly…
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The Real Problem with the US News Rankings
The latest list of Best Global Universities for Computer Science from US News has not been well received. For example, the Computing Research Association issued a statement saying that “Anyone with knowledge of CS research will see these rankings for what they are – nonsense – and ignore them. But others may be seriously misled.”…
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The Dreaded Practice Talk
[I wrote a post with the same title in 2010; this is an updated version.] In a week you’ll be giving a talk about your work to 600 people at a conference, or perhaps to five people who will sign off (or not) on your thesis. Depending on your area and the type of talk,…
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Vigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
The other day a non-CS friend remarked to me that since computer science is a quantitative, technical discipline, most issues probably have an obvious objective truth. Of course this is not at all the case, and it is not uncommon to find major disagreements even when all parties are apparently reasonable and acting in good…