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

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 […]

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 and scattering of program concerns really exist in real programs? Do they have a strong […]

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 at WikiSym 2011, the best features are the ones pertaining to user behavior within the […]

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 lot. But those clones are only in about 15% of projects, meaning that 85% of […]

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; […]

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 the sum of the old parts. There is life on the Web that doesn’t exist […]

A lot has been written about Facebook’s and Google’s requirements for people to sign up with real world names. That requirement seems pretty silly to me, as the concepts of identity and personas seem to have a cognitive dimension that goes well beyond the tyranny of singular physicality — even in real life!