Some brain food for academic thinkers

As the Fall semester starts, the MPC group has gained a few new students. As is tradition in the lab, we engage in a great deal of intellectual discourse about the world, culture, programming, science, research, and academia. Over the years I’ve been gifted some amazing articles, so I thought I’d document them here for other academic thinkers, or, at worst, my own memory.

As an aside, I appreciate when professors make use of their tenure and take bold, public stances (though I don’t always agree with the stance). Some of these articles are edgy, but they’ll make you think.

I have another few essays to post, however, they don’t quite fit the general theme here so I’ll save them for later. Without further ado, the reading list (in no particular order):

• No, It Ain’t Gonna Be Like That (PDF) by Kanazawa
• Why are Modern Scientists so Dull? (PDF) (or shorter HTML version here) by Charlton
• You and Your Research (HTML) (or PDF here) by Hamming
• A Mathematician’s Lament (PDF) by Lockhart
• Don’t be a Scientist (HTML) by Katz
• An Epidemic of Rat Farming (HTML) by Regehr
• The Real Science Gap (HTML) by Benderly

How many of these have you read? Am I missing other gems? Agree or disagree with one strongly? Let me know!

Austin Software Mentorship — Meeting this Thursday

Last semester I received an energetic email about offering UT students one-on-one interaction with local software professionals. At first, I did not understand the vision (sorry Sukant!), but I felt it was worth pursuing so I replied. After a couple emails I was on-board and ready to help out with the noble vision. Basically, students graduate with a lot of skills, but they still have a lot left to learn before they’re truly effective in industry. Why don’t we augment the curriculum and arm students with the skills they need while they’re still in school? From this simple idea, Austin Software Mentorship was born. It’s a really cool group and I’m proud of where it’s going! I’ve met a lot of incredible local people and been humbled and impressed by their range of skills. I have a lot to learn

So why am I am posting? To announce the first major event!

What: Professional-grade classwork: How software professionals might code your homework and projects

Where: TAY 3.128

When: 7pm Thursday, February 11th

More Information
PROFESSIONAL-GRADE CLASSWORK
How software professionals might code your homework and projects

Local software professionals will introduce concepts, techniques, and tools
essential to software development in industry.  Students in a software
discipline are encouraged to work these practices into their software
classwork.

Pizza and beverages will be provided.

I encourage any student or software professional to join the mailing list and get involved; I promise you won’t be disappointed.

That’s PhD Candidate Seth Holloway to You!

Yesterday afternoon I proposed my work, “Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments.” I passed with a few good suggestions but no major revisions required; I’m told the outcome is about as good as it gets, however, I hope this is not how “as good as it gets” feels. I’m officially ABD (all but dissertation), so the fun begins!

Thanks to everyone who supported me in-person and in-spirit! I’m very lucky to have so many great people in my life.

I’ll be proposing “Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments” next Tuesday

I sent an email to the Students in Software Engineering, but I’d like to cover my bases and make the announcement public. It is rather unorthodox to invite everyone to a proposal, but I’m doing great work and I’m ready to spread the word!

You are invited to my Ph.D. qualifying exam on Tuesday, November 10 at 2pm in ENS 637. If you are considering a PhD, I encourage you to come and learn the process! The talk should also be entertaining for those of you interested in intelligent environments (e.g., smart homes). These presentations generally last one hour.

Please do not feel obligated to come; if you can make it and you’re interested, you are welcome.

Who: Future Dr. Seth Holloway
What: Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments
Where: ENS 637
When: 2-4pm Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Useful tool for academics: wikicfp.com

Recently, my ever-helpful labmate, Dr. Drew Stovall, suggested the call for papers wiki, or wikicfp.com. The site is well done: easy to navigate, intuitive, open, and free. Basically, you subscribe to the conferences you’re interested in, then the site will email you approaching deadlines. They also offer an amazing calendar view so you can plan your vacation submissions.

As I prepare to propose and begin the sprint to the finish, I was reviewing target deadlines on the site. I noticed that a conference recommended by one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Andy Ko was not on the site. In about two minutes I was able to add the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 2010, not only to my own list, but to the site as a whole. Now, other HCI aficionados can sign stay abreast of the conference . See the CFP here. There’s probably a slant towards technical fields, which is to be expected because technical people are most likely to use a tool like this; however, the platform is incredibly powerful and open-ended, so I hope everyone uses the site.

I hope this is helpful for other paper-writers. Are there other cool tools I’m missing? I’d love to find out how to do my job more efficiently, so please share!

Smart Home User Study

I am gathering data for my PhD work and I’d really appreciate if you’d take a survey on smart homes. Initial participants have completed in the survey in five to 30 minutes. The survey will be open until Friday August 14, 2009. Please take a few minutes for the survey now:

Help me out and influence the future of aware homes! Not to overstate this project, but your participation is singly the most important thing you can do with your life so please do yourself a favor and take the survey!

If you know of anyone else who would be interested in taking part of this exciting research, please pass the link along. Here’s our official email recruitment letter:

Professor Christine Julien and PhD student Seth Holloway from The University of Texas at Austin are studying smart homes and we want to hear from you! Anyone over the age of 18 is encouraged to participate.

This purpose of this study is to discover how the general populace conceives of smart homes. We hope to gather a baseline level for research in a fundamentally new approach to interacting with smart homes. The goals of this research are to support the development of intuitive interfaces for everyone with the hope of providing vastly more efficient and effective means of interacting with the home. Your assistance will help us advance this exciting new research area!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=sHs4AQr15nT5jnRzmhJiwA_3d_3d

We expect each study to take approximately 30 minutes. Anyone over the age of 18 is encouraged to participate. Your opinion is highly valued and greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Christine Julien and Seth Holloway

Software Engineering Genealogy

I recently discovered the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy. For those outside the ivory tower, this genealogy mirrors standard human breeding records. In the not-so-distant future I will be an indentation under Christine Julien, below Gruia-Catalin Roman. Standard genealogical terms apply in the academic version as well; for example, Christine is my academic parent.

Just as in humans, breed history can be an important determination of future success. A descendant of a well-known researcher will have high expectations to perform like their academic ancestor, but this is also a great way to position oneself for the job one desires. For example, if you want to be a professor, ensure that your advisor has graduated other students who became faculty. Unfortunately, this way of thinking favors older professors and can make it hard for new faculty to establish themselves despite their fresh ideas and tenacity. As with humans, genealogy comes with no guarantees! Individuals create their own track records. An advisor’s personality and research should play into the perspective student’s decision. Find an interesting topic and do it well!

While we’re on the subject, another fun genealogical term borrowed by scholars is “academic imbreeding” or “academic incest” which refers to the taboo practice of hiring people from the host university.

And that concludes today’s lecture. Visit me in my office hours if you have any questions. Have a nice weekend!

Putting humans to good use

I shared this on my Google Reader, but I’d like to more formally share Luis Von Ahn’s great talk on the recaptcha.

http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/06/speaking-at-library-of-congress.html

The talk covers the basics of a CAPTCHA (the hard-to-read words that verify you are human when signing up for online accounts) then discusses the recaptcha. The recaptcha pairs two random English words together so it can yield some funky phrases such as the “desert voter” shown below. (Watch the video for much better pairings!) The recaptcha uses one known word and one word that cannot be read by a machine. By distributing the otherwise unreadable word to multiple people, von Ahn is able to effortlessly digitize the written word. I respect and admire the ingenuity here. Dr. von Ahn simultaneously repels spammers and digitizes books!

Recaptcha

This work provides two great insights to me: (1) humans are still better than computers at some things and (2) harnessing intelligence in a scalable way can have dramatic results. Want to make a mint? Figure out how to harness humans’ idle/unproductive time.

Working with LaTeX: See all your citations

UPDATE

J.P. Knight left a much easier solution in the comments. If you want to see all of your citations the easy way, simply put the \nocite{*} command into your latex file as seen below.

\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage{natbib}
\bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{,}{,}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\nocite{*}
\bibliography{proposal}    %% your bib file name here
\end{document}

I’m currently writing my dissertation (technically my proposal) in LaTeX (think Microsoft Word without the WYSIWYG interface). As I’m searching for citations, I am overwhelmed at the number of sources in my bibtex file. Rather than staring at the bland, perhaps bloated, syntax with curly braces, spaces, and commas, I created a little script that would let me see how the citations will look in the paper–in a nice PDF bibliography. Here, I present seeAllCitations.sh which takes in your bibtex file as an argument and creates a file with all of your potential citations. After the script completes, just “compile” the file as you normally would and open the resulting pdf/dvi.

#!/bin/sh

# Check input for one argument
if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
echo “Please input your .bib file as an argument”
echo “Example: ./seeAllCitations.sh proposal.bib”
exit 1
fi

#  Create the file
echo “Creating seeAllCitations.tex that will allow you to see all citations.”

# Create a simple tex file that will include citations
echo “\documentclass[11pt]{report}
\usepackage{cite}
\usepackage{url}
\\\begin{document}
\n
All citations from $1 shown below
\n
%% Begin citations” > seeCitations.tex

cat $1 |grep @ |sed s/^@.*{/\\\\\\cite{/ |sed s/,.*$/}\\\\\\\\/ >> seeCitations.tex

echo “%% End citations
\n
\\\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
\\\bibliography{$1}
\n
\\\end{document}” >> seeCitations.tex

# Process completed
echo “Process completed. Enjoy!”
echo “Confused about what to do next? Create the document. For example:
pdflatex seeCitations.tex
bibtex seeCitations.tex
pdflatex seeCitations.tex
open seeCitations.pdf”
exit 0

See any mistakes? Was that at all helpful? Do you have a different (read: better) method for checking your citations?

I survived ICSE 2009

Better late than never, right?

Last Sunday I returned from Vancouver where I was attending the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). I met a lot of great and interesting people. A few that stand out are

• Sherlock Licorish – the soft-spoken researcher from Guyana who told me I was an academic
• Justin Erenkrantz – the President of the Apache Software Foundation who was really down to Earth and cool
• Andy Ko – a professor finishing up his first year at University of Washington. Andy was an all-around great person: articulate, helpful, funny

I also had the honor of hanging out with a couple esteemed colleagues, Drew Stovall and Hyrum Wright, and my wonderful wife.

And a big thanks to the person that made this all possible, Dr. Christine Julien.

Vancouver was an amazing city! I feel extremely glad to be able to see the Pacific Northwest in the late Spring/early Summer. We experienced temperatures  in the 40s to 70 with ample sunshine and a light breeze. By most definitions, near perfect weather. In the eight days we were there it only rained once! Of course, that was the day we were on an open-top zodiac chasing whales, but the experience was too cool to let a little rain get in the way (my retrospective opinion, not the opinion I held while freezing on the chilly waters of the Pacific Ocean). We had awesome Japanese food, terrific Chinese food, a tasty bubble tea, and other ethnic fare that was totally worthwhile.

Before ICSE, we were in Madison, WI to see my sister graduate with her PhD. Her research was about DBMSs on flash disks. Congratulations to her on this momentous ocassion. We’re all very proud!