Category: 1. Research

  • To review or not to review

    To review or not to review

    I previously reported about a bogus review for a journal submission of ours. The submission had been rejected partly or fully based on a review that obviously had nothing to do with our paper but must have been reused from before. I had complained to the editor, but I had not got any answers for…

  • Creating a ROS 2 distribution (upcoming talk)

    Creating a ROS 2 distribution (upcoming talk)

    I’ll be giving a (somewhat unusual) talk about a new project I’m interested in. The talk will be held at UCSC (California Bay Area) second week of January and UQAM (Montreal) third week of January. HMU for details if you are are interested. Abstract: The Robot Operating System (now ROS 2) is an open source…

  • Inner-source software development (upcoming talk)

    Inner-source software development (upcoming talk)

    I’ll be giving a talk on our inner source research at Concordia and McGill (both located in Montreal) third week of January. HMU for details if you are interested. Abstract: Inner-source software development is the use of open source practices for firm-internal software development. In inner source, developers collaborate across organizational silo boundaries for higher…

  • Fixing scientific language using chat AIs

    Fixing scientific language using chat AIs

    I wanted to know whether a chat AI like ChatGPT would help my students and me improve scientific writing (not every Ph.D. student is born with superior language skills). So I asked.

  • A common single-person research design that does not work (well)

    A common single-person research design that does not work (well)

    I’ve had some success in grant proposals with research designs for human-centered software engineering that follow the following (common) pattern. It is a three-step of I won a couple of one-person (Ph.D. student, i.e. three years of work) grants with this, but execution has been harder than expected. The skilled observer (e.g. experienced principal investigator)…

  • Have you seen this review?

    Have you seen this review?

    We recently submitted a structured literature review to a well-ranked journal, and got a review back complaining about how badly our controlled experiment had been carried out. We inquired with the editor about this, but got no answer back. The review (by reviewer 2, no less) is so generic, I suspect it has been used…