This is the story of Jan Vitek and I approaching the ACM Publications Board with a proposal for publishing the OOPSLA papers in a journal. Even though we did this together, the analysis and opinions in this post are mine alone. TL;DR: if there’s any lesson to be learned from the ACM Publications Board’s policies on scientific publication is […]

The market of scientific publications is such an organic mess, there’s no end to topics that can be beaten over their heads. This post is about “open access” publications. Lately there has been a push back against publishers that keep their content behind pay walls, coupled with a big favoritism for publishers that offer their […]

Serving as Program Committee Chair of OOPSLA 2013 has been an enlightening experience, and I’d like to share one more insight I’ve gained (I wrote about another one here). Specifically, I want to focus on the acceptance rate.

Some conversations I’ve been having over the past year led me to a deeper exploration of the issue of conferences vs. journals in Computer Science. The debate, so far, seems to be missing a few critical observations regarding scientific journals and our own ACM, and therefore it is somewhat incomplete. This essay lays out my […]

Some time ago, 2 of my PhD students were facing the prospect of going away to do their research elsewhere for a few months. In both cases, and for different reasons, it made a lot of sense for them to go. But we needed to stay in touch, and I needed to keep tabs on […]

I recently watched a TED talk with a fun topic: why is ‘x’ used as the unknown variable in Algebra and beyond? If you haven’t seen it, this 4-min talk is above. The thesis is this: x is used, because the Spanish, who were the first to translate the great scientific and engineering knowledge coming […]

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, i.e. within the expectations of academic programs and research funding agencies that support research work […]

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 possibility of motherhood to hundreds of thousands of women who waited just too long to […]

    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 one year and a half of “programming,” I just pressed “Run.” It’s a little crazy […]

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 vast majority of these inquiries don’t pass my mental spam filter; a small percentage does; […]