What I Accomplished in Grad School
I often talk to students who are thinking about grad school. The advice I generally give is a dressed-up version of “Just do whatever the hell will make you happy.” But if we all had solid ideas about...
View ArticleReproducibility in Computer Systems Research
These results about reproducibility in CS have been the subject of lively discussion at Facebook and G+ lately. The question is, for 613 papers, can the associated software be located, compiled, and...
View ArticleResearch Advice from Alan Adler
Although I am a happy French press user, I enjoyed reading an article about Alan Adler and the AeroPress that showed up recently on Hacker News. In particular, I love Adler’s advice to inventors: Learn...
View ArticleHints for Computer System Design
On the last day of my advanced OS course this spring we discussed one of my all-time favorite computer science papers: Butler Lampson’s Hints for Computer System Design. Why is it so good? It’s...
View ArticleA Guide to Better Scripty Code for Academics
[Suresh suggested that I write a piece about unit testing for scripty academic software, but the focus changed somewhat while I was writing it.] Several kinds of software are produced at universities....
View ArticleReviewing Research Papers Efficiently
The conference system that we use in computer science guarantees that several times a year, each of us will need to review a lot of papers, sometimes more than 20, in a fairly short amount of time. In...
View ArticleInward vs. Outward Facing Research
One of the things I like to think about while watching research talks is whether the work faces inward or outward. Inward facing research is mostly concerned with itself. A paper that uses most of its...
View ArticleInexpensive CPU Monster
Rather than using the commercial cloud, my group tends to run day-to-day jobs on a tiny cluster of machines in my office and then to use Emulab when a serious amount of compute power is required....
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Sabbatical at TrustInSoft
At the beginning of September I started at TrustInSoft, a Paris-based startup where I’ll be working for the next 10 months. I’ll post later about what I’m doing here, for now a bit about the company....
View ArticleLatency Numbers Every Professor Should Know
### Latency numbers every professor should know Email from student ............................ 20 sec Person at office door ......................... 8 min Other interruption...
View ArticleVigorous Public Debates in Academic Computer Science
The other day a non-CS friend remarked to me that since computer science is a quantitative, technical discipline, most issues probably have an obvious objective truth. Of course this is not at all the...
View ArticleHow Getting Tenure Is Supposed to Work
The other day Geoff Challen posted a blog entry about his negative tenure vote. Having spent roughly equal time on the getting-tenure and having-tenure sides of the table, I wanted to comment on the...
View ArticleThe Dreaded Practice Talk
[I wrote a post with the same title in 2010; this is an updated version.] In a week you’ll be giving a talk about your work to 600 people at a conference, or perhaps to five people who will sign off...
View ArticleThe Real Problem with the US News Rankings
The latest list of Best Global Universities for Computer Science from US News has not been well received. For example, the Computing Research Association issued a statement saying that “Anyone with...
View ArticleStories Behind Papers: Integer Overflow
A couple months ago Jean Yang and Vijay Chidambaram had a Twitter discussion about the stories behind research efforts that you might hear over coffee, but that usually don’t get written up. Vijay...
View ArticleTrust Boundaries in Software Systems
One of the big things that has changed in computer science education over the last 20 years is that it is now mandatory to prepare students for writing software that lives in a hostile environment....
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Closing the Loop: The Importance of External Engagement in Computer Science...
Computer scientists tend to work by separating the essence of a problem from its environment, solving it in an abstract form, and then figuring out how to make the abstract solution work in the real...
View ArticlePaths to External Engagement in Computer Science Research
The other day I wrote a post imploring academic computer scientists to at least occasionally break out of their research bubbles and engage with real engineering problems where their research matters....
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Walking or Biking to NSF
Since the National Science Foundation funds a large fraction of academic computer science research in the USA, we often end up traveling to Washington to visit the NSF. This post is just to say that if...
View ArticleIt’s Time for a Modern Synthesis Kernel
Alexia Massalin’s 1992 PhD thesis has long been one of my favorites. It promotes the view that operating systems can be much more efficient than then-current operating systems via runtime code...
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