Category: Computer Science

  • Putting Oneself Through College

    A lot has been written lately about the rising costs of higher education. Is it still possible to put oneself through college without working full time? It’s certainly not easy. For example, the Utah minimum wage is $7.25/hour. If a student works 20 hours per week for 50 weeks, the resulting $7,250 doesn’t even cover…

  • Open Access Fees

    The “open access fee” is a charming little aspect of academic publishing where I have the option to pay, for example, $3000 to the IEEE, and then they’ll poke a hole in their paywall so that anyone can download a paper without paying. The fee is per paper. Here’s a list of some publishers’ fees.…

  • The Children of the Sky

    Basically anything Vernor Vinge writes will get reviewed here; he’s one of my favorite SF authors and certainly the best CSF (computer science fiction) writer working today. His latest book, The Children of the Sky, is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and a cousin to A Deepness in the Sky. A…

  • Career Advice I’ve Received

    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…

  • Advice for Assistant Professors

    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…

  • 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…

  • Draft Paper about Integer Overflow

    Last Spring I had a lucky conversation. I was chatting with Vikram Adve, while visiting the University of Illinois, and we realized that we working on very similar projects — figuring out what to do about integer overflow bugs in C and C++ programs. Additionally, Vikram’s student Will and my student Peng had independently created…

  • Better Random Testing by Leaving Features Out

    [I wrote this post, but it describes joint work, principally with Alex Groce at Oregon State.] This piece is about a research result that I think is genuinely surprising — a rare thing. The motivating problem is the difficulty of tuning a fuzz tester, or random test case generator. People like to talk trash about…

  • 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…

  • Hello Android

    Some semesters I teach courses that just need to be taught. On the other hand, this Fall I get to teach a class that should be purely fun — an Android projects course for upper-level undergrads. I already promised an “A” to anyone who (legitimately) makes at least $100 using an application developed for the…