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!

Once a year, during the summer, I get to travel back in time. It’s about 5,600 miles from California to Portugal, and about 60 years from the life style in Irvine (or Lisbon, for that matter) to the life style in my mother’s house in Mangualde. Give or take another 60. Time travel is not […]

Yesterday I posted part I of my bad conference review war stories. Today, I’m posting part II — and, hopefully, last! This was the first incident I experienced with bad reviews, and it illustrates the phenomenon much better. This incident happened back in 2007 on a technical paper we submitted to the International Conference on […]

Yesterday, a Facebook friend posted a link to a great talk by Jeffrey Naughton about the depressing state of affairs in CS research communities. I won’t do justice to that talk by trying to summarize it; follow the link and see it for yourself. His slides reminded me of a few review war stories I’ve […]

It’s Commencement time! So I thought I’d compile a list of 1010 10000 things I believe all ICS students should have done (by  themselves) by the time they get their diplomas. With luck, students have come across some of these in courses. Most likely, that won’t happen, so students need to make time for extra-curricular […]

Having a background in programming language design, I have acquired a professional obsession about syntax and semantics of words — not just pertaining to programming languages but also pertaining to natural language. If you want to get me all  bitchy in a meeting, stretch the use of common words beyond reason in order to get […]