Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
A chemistry researcher published a paper in Science with two junior collaborators and, a few months later, found flaws and retracted the article. She commented “I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year’s paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams” and “it is painful to admit, but important to do so” and … Read more
In the restrooms of French freeway service stations managed by Total, the soap dispensers partake of pressing advice: The message reads: ONLY ONCE Press for clean hands 1x Total wants to save on costs. Soap is money. Fine. But on the matter of hand-washing one might (perhaps) think, in the current circumstances, of more urgent … Read more
On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and … Read more
When you want to contact academic researchers, particularly computer scientists, you often find their email addresses on their Web pages in a mildly obfuscated form such as “albert dot einstein at princeton dot edu”. If you try to copy-paste such a pseudo-address into an email client so as to fix it there, you often have … Read more
Gilles Brassard, quantum cryptography pioneer (among other achievements), will give two talks this Wednesday (22.01): One at the University of Zurich, at 11:15 (session start at 10:30) on “The Art of Secret Communication in a Quantum World””. The other at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology at 18:30 (session start at 17:30, talks followed by Apéro) … Read more
I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).
The “Morgenstern Colloquium” at the University of Nice / INRIA Sophia Antipolis invited me to give a talk, next Wednesday (18 December) at 11 in Sophia Antipolis, in the aptly named* “Kahn Building”. The announcement appears here. I proposed various topics but (pleasant surprise) the organizers explicitly asked me to lecture about what I really … Read more
Software engineering has improved a lot in the past couple of decades, but there remains an area where the old doomsday style of starting a software engineering paper (software crisis, everything is rotten…) still fits: requirements engineering. Just see the chasm between textbook advice and the practice of most projects. I have written on requirements … Read more
December 16 (next Monday), the newly created Schaffhausen Institute of Technology organizes an entire day of events around three (no less) talks by the physics Nobel prize winner and MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle. The culmination of the day is a talk by Prof. Ketterle in the evening on “What happened to the kilogram?”. From the … Read more