Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Unethical research, beneficence, and smart experimentation
An unnamed research group at University of Zurich is in the news for unethical research: According to this article by Science and the corresponding Reddit report, a research group experimented with the use of LLMs posing as humans on a subreddit (forum). The research question was to see if and how LLMs were more successful…
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The not-so-sweet spot of software engineering research
tl;dr Avoid using qualitative research methods in technology-centered software engineering research as you might not be lucky with your reviewers Anyone following me along knows I love my 2×2 matrices. So here is another one, showing my experiences with research methodologies (qualitative or quantitative) vs. software engineering research (human-centered or technology-centered). With human-centered research I’m…
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Only 15% plagiarism! How is this not funny (academic humor)
Just keep that plagiarism to a reasonable level. (OK, I may not be fair, and it may be an English language issue as reuse of materials is generally possible across multiple publications. Still…)
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GenAI in urgent need of a DEI initiative
Apparently, we are all Linus Torvalds. Or more precisely, if your public profile is associated with open source, ChatGPT might think you should look like them. The following four prompts were entered in sequence (but output was cut short). I only prompted 2-4 after I thought this person from the first output looks vaguely familiar…
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Not a fan of the title “professor of empirical software engineering”
At TU Berlin, until recently, there was a “professor of parser construction” (official title). What was a hot topic 30 years ago, maybe, was not so hot thereafter. Today I see a fair bit of “professor of empirical software engineering” or “empirical software engineering research groups”. I wonder what everyone else in the department is…
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Charging money for an ethics review?
Together with a psychologist, I’m currently performing a comparatively simple interview study about the effectiveness of a software engineering method. Proper procedure is paramount in psychology, so we submitted an ethics review request to my employer’s institutional (ethics) review board. I didn’t think we’d need the ethics approval, and lo and behold the ethics board…