Author Archives: crista

Simulating a City

Posted on May 6, 2012 by crista

For the past 4 years or so, in my spare time, I have been working with a small start-up company, Encitra, whose goal is to help cities and real estate developers make sustainable urban plans come to life in the … Continue reading →

Posted in simulation, social software systems | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Single Most Important Thing

Posted on March 25, 2012 by crista

What is the single most important feature of a programming system without which you can’t write programs effectively?

Posted in commentary, social software systems | 1 Comment

Research in Programming Languages

Posted on March 2, 2012 by crista

Is there still research to be done in Programming Languages? This essay touches both on the topic of programming languages and on the nature of research work. I am mostly concerned in analyzing this question in the context of Academia, … Continue reading →

Posted in academia, research | Tagged | 104 Comments

Ethics in Economics

Posted on November 1, 2011 by crista

Imagine this. You have a brilliant idea for how to reverse the effects of aging in female infertility, a wonderful combination of drugs that you have been developing in your lab with your graduate students, and that will open the … Continue reading →

Posted in academia, commentary, ethics | 2 Comments

Producing SPLASH

Posted on October 22, 2011 by crista

    I’m chairing SPLASH/OOPSLA this year. That means that I’m like a Producer, I get to do all the work behind the scenes in order to make the conference come to life. And it’s finally coming to life. After … Continue reading →

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A Theory of Aspects as Latent Topics

Posted on September 17, 2011 by crista

Underlying the work on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) there is a premise that no one ever challenged: the existence of cross-cutting concerns that find their way to programs in a tangled and scattered manner. We’ve all seen it. But do tangling … Continue reading →

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Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia

Posted on September 15, 2011 by crista

If you have to develop a classifier for detecting vandalism in Wikipedia with just a small number of features, what kind of features give the best results? According to our latest work on vandalism detection in Wikipedia, to be presented … Continue reading →

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File cloning in open source: the good, the bad and the ugly

Posted on September 14, 2011 by crista

How much copying is there in open source projects? According to our recent study soon to be presented at ICSM 2011, more than 10% of files found in open source Java projects are clones of other files. That is a … Continue reading →

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Graduate School Application Dos and Don'ts

Posted on September 5, 2011 by crista

It’s the beginning of a new academic year. With it, there comes  a new wave of inquiries about applying to UCI/ICS graduate programs and joining my research group. I’ve seen these waves every year for the past 9 years. The … Continue reading →

Posted in academia, advice | Comments Off

Life on the Web

Posted on August 29, 2011 by crista

For the most part, activities on the Web are projections of activities that had been going on before it: banking, travel arrangements, publishing, document sharing, news, etc. But in some important ways, the resulting new whole is much more than … Continue reading →

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