Scholarly Communication

Listen to this interview of Jenny Liang, PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her coauthored paper A Qualitative Study on the Implementation Design Decisions of Developers (ICSE 2023).Jenny Liang : "When it comes to selecting specific results or codes, I like to think about it in terms of what was surprising. So, maybe it's not so surprising that people think about requirements when making these implementation design decisions — and that's why we didn't talk about that. But what will be interesting, for example, is the fact that they think about future requirements that might come down the pipeline — and so, that's why we selected that. So, that is one heuristic, for me, basically: know what the prior literature is, know what the relevant community believe — and then cater to that." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Yun Peng, Research Associate, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China; and also, Cuiyun Gao, Associate Professor, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. We talk about their coauthored paper Static Inference Meets Deep Learning: A Hybrid Type Inference Approach for Python (ICSE 2022).Yun Peng : "And I remember the reviewers at ICSE commenting how they never imagined solving the type-inference problem in just this way. So, for me, the takeaway here, is: When we are conducting research or writing a paper or solving a technical problem, we do well to look into life and draw inspiration from there to do the work — because I know we can be greatly inspired by the things just around us in our everyday lives." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Sterre van Breukelen, engineer, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands; and Ann Barcomb, Assistant Professor, University of Calgary, Canada; and Sebastian Baltes, Full Professor, University of Bayreuth, Germany; and Alexander Serebrenik, Full Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper "STILL AROUND": Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers (ICSE 2023).Alexander Serebrenik : "It's a typical criticism of any human-factors study in software engineering, namely: What makes software engineers any different than any other human being — could a study have been conducted, say, with nurses or judges or whichever other professional category you can imagine. Therefore, in this paper "STILL AROUND" it was crucial for us to present clearly in the Introduction what it is that makes software engineers somehow special with respect to gender and age. Because otherwise, we would have struggled to convince researchers to devote any attention to the topic."Link to paper that Alexander and Sebastian refer to as one of the seeds for this paper, "STILL AROUND" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guests Luís Cruz, an Assistant Professor researching green AI and energy-efficient software at Delft University, and Roberto Verdecchia, who focuses on empirical software engineering at the University of Florence, dive into their coauthored paper on Green AI. They discuss the importance of systematic literature reviews, the intersection of software engineering and sustainability, and the critical need to align academic research with industry needs. Their insights highlight the balance between rigorous processes and the resulting relevance of findings in the evolving landscape of Green AI.

Listen to this interview of Floris Gorter, PhD student, and Cristiano Giuffrida, Associate Professor — both at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper Sticky Tags: Efficient and Deterministic Spatial Memory Error Mitigation using Persistent Memory Tags (SP 2024).Cristiano Giuffrida : "But apart from applying for positions on PCs, early-career researchers can also learn the linguistic norms of their community by reading. Good researchers just read a lot of papers — papers from across their broader communities, and especially papers from the top venues where the communities publish. Because by doing that, you learn the language — you start seeing and understanding the patterns in communication. Like, 'Oh, people write the Introduction like this' — you know, there's a problem statement, and there's emphasis placed on this and that, and there are certain keywords that convey certain drifts. So, you begin picking up the language." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Nicholas Boucher, PhD, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Bad Characters: Imperceptible NLP Attacks (SP 2022) — and check out, too, Nicholas's presentation of the paper here.Nicholas Boucher: "Maybe what is interesting about the security domain is that, oftentimes, in these attack papers, you start with a hypothesis, but it's an hypothesis already informed by some result you've observed in the wild — so, you've seen some sort of system — or, to be concrete, in our case, we saw people switching between alphabets on keyboards, and that enabled us to notice how such an action could interact with the language models quickly growing in popularity — and it is at that point that a security researcher will say, 'Wow, I have something here. I know that this is a vulnerability.' But then the questioning begins, like, how to frame the vulnerability, that is, how to turn one specific example (which the researcher has a strong feeling really is a vulnerability) and uplevel it to something larger. Because that is when, in my opinion, the researcher's starting to ask very fruitful questions." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Alfonso de la Vega, Assistant Professor, Software Engineering and Real-Time Group, University of Cantabria, Spain. We talk about his coauthored paper FLEXMI: a generic and modular textual syntax for domain-specific modelling (SOSYM 2023).Alfonso de la Vega : "Yeah, we never really get the whole story in just the paper that presents the tool. There is so much work behind that — getting software that's good enough and also valid, so that it supports a research article, and then from there, to get to the point where the software is used in industry (as Epsilon is used) — that takes a lot of added work, a lot of cross-institute collaboration, a lot of dedication." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Amir Mir, PhD candidate, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; and of Sebastian Proksch, Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; and also of Georgios Gousios, Head of Research, Endor Labs. We talk about their coauthored paper Type4Py: Practical Deep Similarity Learning-Based Type Inference for Python (ICSE 2022).Georgios Gousios : "Yes, we submitted and resubmitted this paper many times, but before people think this is a case of paper engineering — you know, increasing publication chances by satisfying reviewers — the truth of the matter is that the actual core content of this paper was and is topnotch — and that's not something you see with all papers. I mean, I myself have written papers that were good, sure, but not near as novel as this one, Type4Py. So, in order to get to ICSE, like we have here, the core content needs to be great, and only then, on top of that, can you begin to massage the message and so on." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Mathé Hertogh, PhD student, and Cristiano Giuffrida, Associate Professor — both in the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper Leaky Address Masking: Exploiting Unmasked Spectre Gadgets with Noncanonical Address Translation (SP 2024).Cristiano Giuffrida : "In security research and AI research — in fact, in AI it's happening even more — there are so many groups, so many researchers working on similar problems, that as a result, we have a lot of papers — a lot of papers being submitting and published at the venues, a lot of papers being constantly put online, for example, on arXiv — so that, all in all, the pressure on researchers to keep up is very high — we just need to read more and more and more papers. So, in answer to this, there is also a growing trend in the writing in papers, and this is, to ensure that the reader can get the maximum amount of information in as little time as possible." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Bran Selic, President and Founder, Malina Software Corporation, Canada. We talk about publishing at ECMFA — that is, at the European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications.Bran Selic : "My experience in both industry and academia has taught me that most innovation actually comes from industry, because industry practitioners live in a competitive environment: it's, advance the state-of-the-art, or die. This forces practitioners to innovate in very pragmatic ways, meaning, to innovate with their products and in their domains. So, that is why I see the role of conferences like ECMFA as serving as a place where researchers can explore how innovations might be generalized, systematized, and ultimately, more clearly understood." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices