Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Over the past few months I have given a few interviews to Russian news outlets on technology- and software-related issues. Here are the links I have. In September, Mikhail Saprykin interviewed me [1] for Kommersant (the main Russian business daily) on a question that worries everyone in technology and academia: the brain drain. In early … Read more
The Saint Petersburg Software Engineering seminar (organized jointly by ITMO and SPbSPU universities) takes place every Thursday, normally 18-21. You can find the program at http://sel.ifmo.ru/seminar/ . Starting with the Dec. 29 seminar, the talks can now be attended remotely. You can follow them live (i.e. starting at 18:00 SP time, 15:00 Zurich/Paris, 9 … Read more
In a blog article posted in its original version on this blog [1] and in a revised version on the Communications of the ACM blog [2], I emphasized the relevance of incremental research. Recently Mikkel Thorup sent me some interesting comments, which I am publishing here as the first Guest Column of this blog. References … Read more
The resources we have at our disposal on a computing system may be huge, but they are always finite, and our programs’ appetite for resources will eventually exhaust them. At that stage, we have to deal with the SBYBAW rule, which sounds like a tautology but is an encouragement to look for clever algorithms: techniques for freeing resources when no resources remain may not request new resources.
A statistical textbook [1] contains this gem of wisdom: Only a fool would conclude that a painting that was judged as excellent by one person and contemptible by another ought therefore to be classified as mediocre. Common sense indeed; but does the procedure not recall how the typical conference program committee works, with averages … Read more
The ETH Chair of Software Engineering has won a grant from the Hasler foundation, in a joint project with the Technical University of Lucerne and the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH, to develop a robotics framework involving concurrent computation. The project, called Roboscoop, will produce a demonstrator system: a “SmartWalker” robot — a robotic version … Read more