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Draft Paper about Better Fuzzing
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…
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Online University
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…
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Open Proposals (or: Take My Idea — Please)
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…
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Proposal for Automated Compiler Bug Reports
[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…
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ISSTA 2011
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…
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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…
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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…
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Continuous Paper Reviewing (Wonkish)
People running conferences often have a single round of reviewing: papers are assigned to program committee members, reviews are due some weeks later, and then after reviewing is finished everyone decides which papers to accept. This works but there’s room for improvement. First, not all papers need the same number of reviews. Second, the number…
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Squeezing a CS Research Idea
[Disclaimer: I wrote about this topic once before, but it was buried in a longer piece. Also, it was in one of the first posts on this blog and I don’t think anyone read it. Update: I checked the stats. Nobody read it.] A hammer I like to use when reviewing papers and PhD proposals…
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Size Matters
Not long ago I served on an NSF panel: a collection of researchers who look at some grant proposals and provide recommendations to NSF program officers who then make decisions about which, if any, of the proposals to fund. After the panel finished, the program manager asked us for feedback about various issues including the…