Latest in Comments on Science and Academia

  • Upcoming talks in September 2023

    Upcoming talks in September 2023

    I’ll be holding the following computer science colloquia talks in the upcoming weeks. All talks are free open to the public. On to previous talks.

  • Industry is where the research data is

    Industry is where the research data is

    Over on Facebook, Lionel Briand commented on how hard it is for an academic research group to compete with industrial organizations on research. This is certainly true for hot topics. Right now, with a burning hot AI summer, the research world is split into the have and have-nots (in terms of GPU resources), and this…

  • Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    Academic publications and what is wrong with them

    The most basic academic currency are your publications. While you can’t (or shouldn’t) trade them, they are the way of how other researchers keep track of you and keep score. The higher your score, the higher you are in the pecking order, of course. A publication has two aspects to it that determine its value:…

  • When requirements come last

    When requirements come last

    Peter Naur was probably the first to realize that “computing is a human activity” and that as we program, we are not only solving problems, we are also only just beginning to understand them. This even affects small projects like student theses. For engineering theses, i.e. theses in which some artifact is to be built,…

  • I hope the authors ignored the bogus review

    I hope the authors ignored the bogus review

    Dear editor: We previously had submitted an article to your journal, and it got rejected. One of the two reviews we received was bland and the other one apparently had been copied over from another review and had nothing to do with our submission:

  • The role and responsibility of an editor or PC chair

    The role and responsibility of an editor or PC chair

    I just saw a tweet arguing that a program committee (PC) chair was being disrespectful of the reviewers, if they (the editor) overruled their (the reviewers) recommendations to accept a paper. I beg to differ. It is the PC chairs job to make the final decision on what gets into the research program and they…