Scholarly Communication

Listen to this interview of Isaac da Silva Torres, Postdoctoral Research, TU Delft, Netherlands. We talk about his coauthored paper Guidelines to Derive an e3value Business Model from a BPMN Process Model: An Experiment on Real-world Scenarios (SOSYM 2023).Isaac da Silva Torres : "I'm an industrial engineer, and I've worked in a lot of companies. Then afterwards, I worked for the government, back in Brazil. And then I came to the Netherlands to do my PhD. But, my work experience, as a business analyst, had always positioned me between business and IT somehow — and being this bridge, well, this worked really well for me. Because, being in between, you really can appreciate, for example, the interests of both sides. I mean, people in business departments, when it comes to digital transformation, for example — they're totally focused on the system — but of course, the people from IT are like, 'Okay, but can you give me the requirements. What exactly do you want?' I'm able to see those two sides, and can act." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Sumon Biswas, Assistant Professor, Case Western Reserve University. We talk about his coauthored paper The Art and Practice of Data Science Pipelines (ICSE 2022).Sumon Biswas : "Yeah, it's true, not many people are working in software design and software architecture — at least at ICSE — and in fact, this has been an important discussion in SE research in general: How can we increase contributions in software design and architecture? And there has been an important push, at ICSE, and at FSE as well, to make the research more representative." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Steffen Zschaler, Reader, King's College London, UK; and of Fiona Polack, Professor, University of Hull, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Trustworthy Agent-based Simulation: The Case for Domain-specific Modelling Languages (SOSYM 2023).Fiona Polack : "The sort of collaborative environment that brings together researchers from many different backgrounds — that's an environment that's very, very creative — and what's more, it also encourages people to address not just the immediate problem, but also to think how you can solve problems more generally, because you keep meeting the same basic problem, it's just dressed up in a different guise." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples and Things host, Lee Vinsel, is joined by guest host and Peoples & Things producer, Joe Forte, Media Projects Manager with Virginia Tech Publishing, in interviewing Marshall Poe, the founder and editor of the New Books Network, the largest academic podcasting platform in the world. The trio discuss how the New Books Network came to be; how digital technologies open up new tools for academic work; changing media landscapes, including the recent bursting of a podcasting bubble; and the future of academic communication and publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Lianglu Pan, PhD Student, and Shaanan Cohney, Senior Lecturer, and also Thuan Pham, Senior Lecturer — everyone at University of Melbourne, Australia. We talk about their coauthored paper EDEFuzz: A Web API Fuzzer for Excessive Data Exposures (ICSE 2024).Thuan Pham : "The reading pattern in our group goes something like this: When reading to broaden our knowledge and come up with ideas, we focus on the conceptual contribution of a paper, instead of zeroing right in on the technical side. Because, when the conceptual side is good, then the paper can be readily applied to similar problems — and what's more, the technical side becomes vastly easier to understand once you've understood the concept to begin."Writing guidance mentioned in the episode: Chicago Writing Program and Joseph William's book Style Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Lorenzo Rossi, Research Fellow, University of Camerino, Italy. We talk about his coauthored paper A Technique for Discovering BPMN Collaboration Diagrams (SOSYM 2024).Lorenzo Rossi : "Yeah, this way of structuring the concluding remarks in this paper is a technique we often apply in our research contributions, especially to journals, where the space limitations are less stringent. This structured approach to the conclusion, where we discuss assumptions and limitations as here, really should almost be somehow mandatory for good research work. Because, especially in foundational research, there's no way around making certain initial assumptions. So, without writing these into your published work, you are (consciously or unconsciously) hiding weaknesses of your contribution, and therefore making it harder for others to build upon your findings." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Kangfeng Ye, Research Associate, University of York, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Probabilistic Modelling and Verification Using RoboChart and PRISM (SOSYM 2022).Kangfeng Ye : "In this paper, I have four coauthors, all of them senior researchers. And when we reviewed the manuscript internally, we adopted a strategy we call sequential review. In the usual process of review at a conference or journal, every submission gets reviewed simultaneously — all reviewers receiving the same manuscript at the same time. However, we ran our internal review (that is, our revisions before submission) in a sequential fashion: I provided the first draft to one coauthor for review, they gave their feedback, I revised in order to provide that next draft to a different coauthor for review, and so on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Emerson Murphy-Hill, Research Scientist, Microsoft. We talk about his coauthored paper GenderMag Improves Discoverability in the Field, Especially for Women (ICSE 2024).Emerson Murphy-Hill : "Too often in papers, the authors get defensive about limitations or threats to validity. Of course, they'll state outright a limitation, like in our paper that we study only one small feature of a company-internal piece of software. But many authors will then grow defensive, claiming, like, 'Well, this is actually a really important piece of software and it's used by tens of thousands of users — our numbers are really big!' But I don't really think that that resonates with readers. I think the defensiveness comes across pretty transparently. So, I think just addressing things head-on is a more effective strategy for having a good and honest conversation with readers and with reviewers." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Ionut Predoaia, Research Fellow, and also, Antonio García-Domínguez, Senior Lecturer — both at the University of York, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Streamlining the Development of Hybrid Graphical-Textual Model Editors for Domain-Specific Languages (ECMFA 2023).Antonio García-Domínguez : "I think that the limitations in any work are really opportunities for follow-up research. I mean, essentially, you are identifying for the reader, 'Look, these are the bits that we've not handled just yet — and obviously, we will likely be the first ones to try to tackle that' — but, you know, there's no reason why really any other researcher in the community wouldn't attempt to tackle that from their angle or for their research purposes. They may have the better idea even, right." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Zejun Zhang, Research Scientist, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We talk about her coauthored paper Hard to Read and Understand Pythonic Idioms? DeIdiom and Explain Them in Non-Idiomatic Equivalent Code (ICSE 2024).Zejun Zhang : "Following my presentation of the paper at ICSE, it was interesting. I mean, there was, first off, a lot of positive response, but then some people in the audience were asking why we would research the readability of Pythonic idioms, and also, why we would translate those idioms into non-idiomatic code. Now, these questions were coming in relation to our previous work on idiomatic code. Nonetheless, the effect for me was that, for future work, we need to further explore this line of the research and really explain Pythonic idioms so that developers can deeply understand them." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices