This post comes on the heels of a Tweeter-conversation I had yesterday, where a colleague asserted that no evidence is needed to know that human reviewers are much better than LLMs at detecting things that read well but are fatally flawed. [This, after I suggested, half-joking, that we should simply replace human reviewers with LLMs […]

Due to the COVID situation, I have, in the past 2 weeks, been approached by several people whose conferences are being cancelled asking me for advice on how to organize a virtual conference. For the past 7 years, I have been vocal about the OpenSimulator Community Conference, a purely virtual conference held in a 3D […]

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this incredible moment in history. In trying to wrap my head around it, I’m turning to what I know best: programs, programming, and software-intensive systems. And their flaws. This is a mini-essay on how the line between software systems and social systems is completely blurred, and how […]

As a computer scientist specializing in programming, the social consequences of software-for-business-efficiency are worrying me more and more. Here at home, we’ve been having a conversation about what post-capitalism would look like in the face of quasi-universal automation, in the best case scenario. It’s really hard to tie all the loose ends of such a vision. […]

How many more security flaws do we need to go through before people accept the fact that almost all of them have a single root cause: the use of C?

I’ve seen the future of conferences. And it runs my code!

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 […]

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 minds and hearts of stakeholders and the general public. We go at it with virtual […]

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

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 […]