Afleveringen
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Listen to this interview of Kangfeng Ye, Research Associate, University of York, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Probabilistic Modelling and Verification Using RoboChart and PRISM (SOSYM 2022).
Kangfeng Ye : "In this paper, I have four coauthors, all of them senior researchers. And when we reviewed the manuscript internally, we adopted a strategy we call sequential review. In the usual process of review at a conference or journal, every submission gets reviewed simultaneously — all reviewers receiving the same manuscript at the same time. However, we ran our internal review (that is, our revisions before submission) in a sequential fashion: I provided the first draft to one coauthor for review, they gave their feedback, I revised in order to provide that next draft to a different coauthor for review, and so on."
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Listen to this interview of Emerson Murphy-Hill, Research Scientist, Microsoft. We talk about his coauthored paper GenderMag Improves Discoverability in the Field, Especially for Women (ICSE 2024).
Emerson Murphy-Hill : "Too often in papers, the authors get defensive about limitations or threats to validity. Of course, they'll state outright a limitation, like in our paper that we study only one small feature of a company-internal piece of software. But many authors will then grow defensive, claiming, like, 'Well, this is actually a really important piece of software and it's used by tens of thousands of users — our numbers are really big!' But I don't really think that that resonates with readers. I think the defensiveness comes across pretty transparently. So, I think just addressing things head-on is a more effective strategy for having a good and honest conversation with readers and with reviewers."
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Listen to this interview of Ionut Predoaia, Research Fellow, and also, Antonio García-Domínguez, Senior Lecturer — both at the University of York, UK. We talk about their coauthored paper Streamlining the Development of Hybrid Graphical-Textual Model Editors for Domain-Specific Languages (ECMFA 2023).
Antonio García-Domínguez : "I think that the limitations in any work are really opportunities for follow-up research. I mean, essentially, you are identifying for the reader, 'Look, these are the bits that we've not handled just yet — and obviously, we will likely be the first ones to try to tackle that' — but, you know, there's no reason why really any other researcher in the community wouldn't attempt to tackle that from their angle or for their research purposes. They may have the better idea even, right."
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Listen to this interview of Zejun Zhang, Research Scientist, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. We talk about her coauthored paper Hard to Read and Understand Pythonic Idioms? DeIdiom and Explain Them in Non-Idiomatic Equivalent Code (ICSE 2024).
Zejun Zhang : "Following my presentation of the paper at ICSE, it was interesting. I mean, there was, first off, a lot of positive response, but then some people in the audience were asking why we would research the readability of Pythonic idioms, and also, why we would translate those idioms into non-idiomatic code. Now, these questions were coming in relation to our previous work on idiomatic code. Nonetheless, the effect for me was that, for future work, we need to further explore this line of the research and really explain Pythonic idioms so that developers can deeply understand them."
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Listen to this interview of Roberto Verdecchia, Assistant Professor, University of Florence, Italy; and also, Per Runeson, Professor, Lund University, Sweden. We talk about their coauthored papers Threats to Validity in Software Engineering Research: A Critical Reflection (IST 2023) and Threats to Validity in Software Engineering — hypocritical paper section or essential analysis? (ESEM 2024).
Per Runeson : "I think what we've seen in our work here on threats to validity — and it was certainly our intention in conducting it in the first place — is, to have the researcher take the initiative and really adopt a reflective attitude. Because, research is not only about investigating facts and testing hypotheses. It's also about reflecting on the learning process, and it's about the extent to which you can trust what you've learned in doing that research, but also it's about the way forward from there, that is, how do we take the work forward into the future."
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Listen to this interview of Nan Jiang, PhD candidate, and Lin Tan, Professor — both at Purdue University. We talk about their coauthored paper Impact of Code Language Models on Automated Program Repair (ICSE 2023).
Lin Tan : "In my research group, the procedure in every project is to write the Introduction early — very early, in fact. It's the first section I have my researchers think about, actually. Because, you know, a lot of people will imagine that the approach section is where you begin — basically, to write exactly what it is that you did. But the advantage of beginning at the Introduction is that you clarify the contributions, you define the problem and also understand well your reason for tackling it. So, typically some three months before the deadline, I have my researchers really start sketching the Introduction in the manuscript."
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Listen to this interview of Jenny Liang, PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about her coauthored paper A Qualitative Study on the Implementation Design Decisions of Developers (ICSE 2023).
Jenny Liang : "When it comes to selecting specific results or codes, I like to think about it in terms of what was surprising. So, maybe it's not so surprising that people think about requirements when making these implementation design decisions — and that's why we didn't talk about that. But what will be interesting, for example, is the fact that they think about future requirements that might come down the pipeline — and so, that's why we selected that. So, that is one heuristic, for me, basically: know what the prior literature is, know what the relevant community believe — and then cater to that."
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Listen to this interview of Yun Peng, Research Associate, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China; and also, Cuiyun Gao, Associate Professor, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. We talk about their coauthored paper Static Inference Meets Deep Learning: A Hybrid Type Inference Approach for Python (ICSE 2022).
Yun Peng : "And I remember the reviewers at ICSE commenting how they never imagined solving the type-inference problem in just this way. So, for me, the takeaway here, is: When we are conducting research or writing a paper or solving a technical problem, we do well to look into life and draw inspiration from there to do the work — because I know we can be greatly inspired by the things just around us in our everyday lives."
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Listen to this interview of Sterre van Breukelen, engineer, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands; and Ann Barcomb, Assistant Professor, University of Calgary, Canada; and Sebastian Baltes, Full Professor, University of Bayreuth, Germany; and Alexander Serebrenik, Full Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper "STILL AROUND": Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers (ICSE 2023).
Alexander Serebrenik : "It's a typical criticism of any human-factors study in software engineering, namely: What makes software engineers any different than any other human being — could a study have been conducted, say, with nurses or judges or whichever other professional category you can imagine. Therefore, in this paper "STILL AROUND" it was crucial for us to present clearly in the Introduction what it is that makes software engineers somehow special with respect to gender and age. Because otherwise, we would have struggled to convince researchers to devote any attention to the topic."
Link to paper that Alexander and Sebastian refer to as one of the seeds for this paper, "STILL AROUND"
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Listen to this interview of Roberto Verdecchia, Assistant Professor, University of Florence, Italy; and also, Luís Cruz, Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper A systematic review of Green AI (WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2023).
Luís Cruz : "Sometimes, especially in systematic studies, we are so worried about the process that we forget about the goals of why we're doing this. That means, we can end up reporting things just because they are part of the process — you know, we feel a need to say something about all that — but really, that way of reporting just produces a review that's a big bulk of highly systematic outputs, but not necessarily a review with relevant and useful findings."
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Listen to this interview of Nicholas Boucher, PhD, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University, UK. We talk about his coauthored paper Bad Characters: Imperceptible NLP Attacks (SP 2022) — and check out, too, Nicholas's presentation of the paper here.
Nicholas Boucher: "Maybe what is interesting about the security domain is that, oftentimes, in these attack papers, you start with a hypothesis, but it's an hypothesis already informed by some result you've observed in the wild — so, you've seen some sort of system — or, to be concrete, in our case, we saw people switching between alphabets on keyboards, and that enabled us to notice how such an action could interact with the language models quickly growing in popularity — and it is at that point that a security researcher will say, 'Wow, I have something here. I know that this is a vulnerability.' But then the questioning begins, like, how to frame the vulnerability, that is, how to turn one specific example (which the researcher has a strong feeling really is a vulnerability) and uplevel it to something larger. Because that is when, in my opinion, the researcher's starting to ask very fruitful questions."
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Listen to this interview of Floris Gorter, PhD student, and Cristiano Giuffrida, Associate Professor — both at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper Sticky Tags: Efficient and Deterministic Spatial Memory Error Mitigation using Persistent Memory Tags (SP 2024).
Cristiano Giuffrida : "But apart from applying for positions on PCs, early-career researchers can also learn the linguistic norms of their community by reading. Good researchers just read a lot of papers — papers from across their broader communities, and especially papers from the top venues where the communities publish. Because by doing that, you learn the language — you start seeing and understanding the patterns in communication. Like, 'Oh, people write the Introduction like this' — you know, there's a problem statement, and there's emphasis placed on this and that, and there are certain keywords that convey certain drifts. So, you begin picking up the language."
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Listen to this interview of Alfonso de la Vega, Assistant Professor, Software Engineering and Real-Time Group, University of Cantabria, Spain. We talk about his coauthored paper FLEXMI: a generic and modular textual syntax for domain-specific modelling (SOSYM 2023).
Alfonso de la Vega : "Yeah, we never really get the whole story in just the paper that presents the tool. There is so much work behind that — getting software that's good enough and also valid, so that it supports a research article, and then from there, to get to the point where the software is used in industry (as Epsilon is used) — that takes a lot of added work, a lot of cross-institute collaboration, a lot of dedication."
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Listen to this interview of Amir Mir, PhD candidate, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; and of Sebastian Proksch, Assistant Professor, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands; and also of Georgios Gousios, Head of Research, Endor Labs. We talk about their coauthored paper Type4Py: Practical Deep Similarity Learning-Based Type Inference for Python (ICSE 2022).
Georgios Gousios : "Yes, we submitted and resubmitted this paper many times, but before people think this is a case of paper engineering — you know, increasing publication chances by satisfying reviewers — the truth of the matter is that the actual core content of this paper was and is topnotch — and that's not something you see with all papers. I mean, I myself have written papers that were good, sure, but not near as novel as this one, Type4Py. So, in order to get to ICSE, like we have here, the core content needs to be great, and only then, on top of that, can you begin to massage the message and so on."
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Listen to this interview of Mathé Hertogh, PhD student, and Cristiano Giuffrida, Associate Professor — both in the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. We talk about their coauthored paper Leaky Address Masking: Exploiting Unmasked Spectre Gadgets with Noncanonical Address Translation (SP 2024).
Cristiano Giuffrida : "In security research and AI research — in fact, in AI it's happening even more — there are so many groups, so many researchers working on similar problems, that as a result, we have a lot of papers — a lot of papers being submitting and published at the venues, a lot of papers being constantly put online, for example, on arXiv — so that, all in all, the pressure on researchers to keep up is very high — we just need to read more and more and more papers. So, in answer to this, there is also a growing trend in the writing in papers, and this is, to ensure that the reader can get the maximum amount of information in as little time as possible."
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Listen to this interview of Bran Selic, President and Founder, Malina Software Corporation, Canada. We talk about publishing at ECMFA — that is, at the European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications.
Bran Selic : "My experience in both industry and academia has taught me that most innovation actually comes from industry, because industry practitioners live in a competitive environment: it's, advance the state-of-the-art, or die. This forces practitioners to innovate in very pragmatic ways, meaning, to innovate with their products and in their domains. So, that is why I see the role of conferences like ECMFA as serving as a place where researchers can explore how innovations might be generalized, systematized, and ultimately, more clearly understood."
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Listen to this interview of Tim Menzies, Editor in Chief, Automated Software Engineering, and also, Full Professor, Computer Science, North Carolina State University. We talk about academic venues that target an industry audience, and we talk about one of his papers at just such a venue, Shockingly Simple: "Keys" for Better AI for SE (SW 2021).
Tim Menzies : "Researchers in SE should study their profession and their venues as much as they study their research. There are linguistic conventions in how we represent ideas — and you can present the same ideas, the same challenges, the same results in different formats so that these are acceptable to different audiences. The point is, you’re allowed to say what you want to say — only, you need to pay that forum the courtesy of studying how they speak and understand things."
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Listen to this interview of Soheil Khodayari, researcher at CISPA, and Giancarlo Pellegrino, faculty also at CISPA — the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany. We talk about their coauthored paper The Great Request Robbery: An Empirical Study of Client-side Request Hijacking Vulnerabilities on the Web (SP 2024).
Giancarlo Pellegrino : "One the challenges here we certainly discussed a lot was, How do we tell our reader what's new in this work? And so, for example, in section 9, our discussion and conclusion — we begin at the current state, that is, at the things our reader knows right now, before our paper has become part of common knowledge. Well, in our case, that knowledge was client-side CSFR, because it was that only instance of request hijacking really known of, and so we begin there."
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Listen to this interview of Christof Ebert, managing director, Vector Consulting Services, Germany; and also, member on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Software and Journal of Systems and Software. We talk about the gap between academia and industry — and we talk, too, about how to bridge that gap.
Christof Ebert : "As in all scientific research, we software engineers need, too, the basic research. But I'd say a distinguishing feature of our field is the trigger point. For example, the trigger point for search algorithms becoming a discipline — well, that was the outcome, really, of Google. It wasn't, primarily, a phenomenon of any university — of course, the inventors of Google came from university backgrounds, but it was the founding of the company that actually innovated the whole search discipline. And this sort of this just happens again and again in computing and computer science."
This interview is a collaboration between the NBN and the Journal of Systems and Software.
Link to IEEE Software From Idea to Impact
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Listen to this interview of Jiaxun Cao, PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, Duke University. We talk about her coauthored paper Understanding Parents’ Perceptions and Practices Toward Children’s Security and Privacy in Virtual Reality (SP 2024).
Download this screenshot and this screenshot of the paper.
In the screenshots, you see red highlighting that shows the purposes for citing a particular work. For example, in Related Work, the authors aim to lead their reader to the relevant background knowledge (e.g., by saying, “Previous studies have collectively pointed out that…). On the other hand, in the Discussion, the authors aim at drawing together all of that knowledge and the knowledge this study now creates (e.g., by saying, “We believe this phenomenon may be attributed to…”).
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