Category: 1. Research
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What makes a great “grand challenge”?
Ten years ago DARPA, the US defense research agency, first organized the DARPA Grand Challenge. The challenge was to build a car that could drive 150 miles through the Mohave desert autonomously. The key is the car’s autonomy: No human brain was to steer it and make decisions, it was computers and other technology all…
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Internal vs. external validity of research funding
So far, most of my research funding has been from industry. Sometimes, I have to defend myself against colleagues who argue that their public funding is somehow superior to my industry funding. This is only a sentiment; they have not been able to give any particular reason for their position. I disagree with this assessment,…
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Soundness vs. importance in publishing (PeerJ computer science journal announced)
Today, PeerJ announced the creation of a new open access computer science journal. After a bit of back and forth a while ago I had accepted the invitation to be on the editorial board. (My main concern was that PeerJ is a for-profit organization but co-founder Pete Binfield convinced me that this will only be…
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Fraudulent publishers not missing a beat in 2015
Unbelievable. About everything in this Call for Papers and the website being linked to is screaming fraud. However, it is so badly done that I can only assume that someone is turning the Scigen experiment on its head.
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Once again natural vs. engineering sciences struggling over definitions #FSE2014
I’m in Hong Kong, attending FSE 2014. I had signed up for the Next-Generation Mining-Software-Repositories workshop at HKUST but missed it for (undisclosed) reasons. Apparently there were two main topics of dicussion: Calls by colleagues to make mining work “useful” rather than “just” interesting Calls by colleagues to build tools rather than “just” generate insight…
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Springer Verlag adding insult to injury
Springer Verlag by way of its incompetence to properly edit manuscripts has been a royal pain in my butt for a long-time. In the most egregious example, one of their editors changed the title of what was a crowning paper of many years of research work. He turned “open source” into “open course”, completely altering…