Embedded in Academia

Category: Academia

  • Verifying a Driver

    Last week my student Jianjun Duan gave a talk about his PhD work at the Workshop for Systems Software Verification in Vancouver. Although preliminary — he verified only three small functions — this work is pretty cool. Jianjun started with a model for the ARM instruction set in HOL4 and augmented it so that memory-mapped…

  • Conference Hijacking

    The ACM Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS) is a small event where researchers interested in the intersection of these areas can share ideas and results. There have been five of these workshops and I’ve attended a few of them and presented a paper at one. It’s a fun event and a perfectly…

  • Going Going Gone

    Technically my sabbatical ended during the summer, but yesterday it really ended when I gave two 75-minute lectures back to back. On a normal Tuesday, this would be followed by a 75-minute embedded systems lab but the students and I get a free pass for a week or two while the lab admins get all…

  • Knowing When to Quit

    In industry it’s often pretty easy to know when to stop working on a project: you might get moved off the project, it might get canceled, etc. In academia, it’s less clear: I can stop working on something after half an hour, or else I can work on basically the same idea until the end…

  • Running an Electronic Program Committee Meeting

    Computer science — at least in the areas that I work in — is conference-driven. Since journals go unread, it’s important that conference program committees make good decisions about which papers to accept. The established way to do this is to hold a program committee (PC) meeting: the entire committee holes up in a highly…

  • Is Attending Meetings a Signaling Behavior?

    Humans and other animals spend a lot of time engaging in signaling behaviors: dressing or acting in certain ways in order to send signals to others. Some signals — a peacock’s tail or a Ferrari — are expensive precisely to show that the signaling organism can afford the cost of sending the signal. Signaling can…

  • Why Would Researchers Oppose Open Access?

    Last week I started sort of a relaxed flame war with other members of the steering committee for an ACM conference on the subject of open access to the proceedings. “Open access” would mean that anyone could download the proceedings. The current situation is slightly different: Often, individual papers are available on authors’ home pages.…

  • The Truth About the Life of the Mind

    [This piece is a followup to The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind.] Being a professor, like any other job, has its pros and cons. You’d hope that one of the advantages would be that the job encourages a person to live a life of the mind. Otherwise what’s the point, right?  I…

  • The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind

    Earlier this year Thomas Benton wrote an essay The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind, skewering academic humanities in the United States. His thesis is that there is effectively a conspiracy to produce many more PhDs than there are faculty slots, and to keep the carrot of the tenure-track faculty position just out…

  • Why Take an Embedded Systems Course?

    Embedded systems are special-purpose computers that users don’t think of as computers. Examples include cell phones, traffic light controllers, and programmable thermostats. In earlier posts I argued why any computer scientist should take a compilers course and an operating systems course. These were easy arguments to make since these areas are core CS: all graduates…