Latest in Comments on Science and Academia

  • On the ordering of nouns in writing

    On the ordering of nouns in writing

    Effective writing is important, or you won’t be understood and achieve your goal. An example is to get the ordering of nouns (or adjectives) in enumerations right. Let’s pick an example: In software engineering, a software feature’s implementation should be correct, complete, and testable. So a project goal could be “to ensure correctness, completeness, and…

  • How to have an impact as a software engineering researcher

    How to have an impact as a software engineering researcher

    Over on Facebook of all places, I took part in a short discussion on how, as a researcher, to have an impact on practice. It is not a convenient answer, but in my opinion, if you want to have an impact, you should go into practice yourself. You can also send your students, but this…

  • Traditional theory building and validation in (computer) science

    Traditional theory building and validation in (computer) science

    Many computer science degree programs do a lousy job at teaching science. A high school student, entering university, often has a good idea what science is about, based on their physics and chemistry classes. At least, it involves controlled experiments. At university, this is rarely picked up, and computer science students are given the idea…

  • The three hats of a professor in Germany

    The three hats of a professor in Germany

    There are lots of infographics on the web of how a professor spends their time, and they mostly miss the point. At the core, and after ten years of living it, I feel confident to say that it really is three roles that a professor in Germany has to play to be successful. I also…

  • The real problem with pay-walled publications

    The real problem with pay-walled publications

    Pay-walled publications are just that: Publications that nobody reads unless someone pays the publisher’s fee. I have no problem with that, because I don’t read pay-walled work and don’t consider it published research and prior art that I should care about. The real problem starts with researchers and editors who expect me to find, read,…

  • Hiring machine learning professors fast to catch-up short-term will make you fall behind long-term

    Hiring machine learning professors fast to catch-up short-term will make you fall behind long-term

    From current observations, I would like to suggest a new law of hiring professors: Hiring professors fast to catch-up short-term will make you fall behind long-term. The reason why I’m writing this are the large amounts of money being made available to German universities to hire new machine learning professors (think “1000 professor program” and…