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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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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…
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Externally Relevant Open Problems in Computer Science
Most academic fields have some externally relevant problems: problems whose solutions are interesting or useful to people who are totally ignorant of, and uninterested in, the field itself. For example, even if I don’t want to know anything about virology, I would still find a cure for the common cold to be an excellent thing.…
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What I Want From a Bibliography System
As a professor I spend a fair amount of time wrangling with references. Because it’s free and reasonably simple, I use BibTeX: an add-on tool for LaTeX that automates the construction of a bibliography by pulling references out of a separate text file, assigning them numbers (or other identifiers), and formatting the entries appropriately. BibTeX…
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A Day in the West Desert
Southern Utah is famous for its canyons and arches. Utah’s West Desert, on the other hand, is not as well-known and is perhaps not as easy to appreciate. It encompasses a large area, containing entire mountain ranges that are virtually unknown (ever heard of the Confusion Range or the Wah Wahs?). It is also very…
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Generalizing and Criticizing Delta Debugging
Delta debugging is a search-based technique for taking an input to a program that triggers a bug and making that input smaller. For example, you might have a sequence of GUI operations that causes Thunderbird to crash. Assuming the crash is deterministic and the input can be replayed automatically, you can iteratively remove UI actions…
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Polar Bears 2011
My work life, as readers of this blog have probably gathered, seems to mainly involve trying to keep funding agencies happy, teaching concepts like deadlock avoidance to bored undergraduates, exhorting grad students to work harder, going to pointless meetings, and spending any remaining time responding to emails. Of course I have a blog where I…