Listen to this interview of Jacob Krüger, Assistant Professor for Software Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. We talk about peer review in software engineering — what it is, and what it might be. Jacob Krüger : "When you submit to broad-themed conferences like ICSE or FSE, you cannot assume much background knowledge on individual tools or techniques which are really, let’s say, the standard in your home community. Because, to succeed as such conferences as those, y...
Oct 08, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 201
Listen to this interview of Carolyn Seaman, Professor of Information Systems, and also, Director of the Center for Women in Technology, at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. We talk about how peer review is conducted at the venues of software engineering. Carolyn Seaman : "English language skills is one thing — but really, the English is just the final layer on your research, because you also need the ability to organize your thoughts, the ability to collaborate with a group of people ...
Oct 05, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 200
Listen to this interview of Klaus Schmid, Professor of Software Engineering, Research Group Software Systems Engineering, University of Hildesheim, Germany. We talk about how research cultures influence and shape research outcomes. Klaus Schmid : "Research writing is an act of communication. This means, the writer is responsible for the mental model that the reader develops as a result of what the text provides. It is, of course, true that no writer can entirely predict the mental model being fo...
Oct 04, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 199
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 how disagreement in research brings advancement. Tim Menzies : "In writing your research, you can't belligerently say, 'I want to say something.' The thing that goes wrong with newbies writing papers is that they write, 'I did. I did. I did.' Because, the people who publish very well, they write, 'They did. They did. ...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 198
Academic writing isn’t known for its clarity. While graduate students might see reading and writing turgid academic prose as a badge of honor—a sign of membership in an exclusive community of experts—many readers are left feeling utterly defeated. In his latest book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter (Princeton University Press, 2024), Fordham University Professor Leonard Cassuto prompts us to think more about the reader. For Cassuto, the key to better academic prose is to anticipate and res...
Sep 29, 2024•56 min•Ep. 197
Listen to this interview of Guilherme Horta Travassos, Systems Engineering and Computer Science Graduate Program, Coppe, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We talk about the review process, both at Information and Software Technology and also more broadly throughout the software-engineering community. Guilherme Horta Travassos : "The review process is hard, because there is the author’s perspective, and there is the reviewer’s perspective, and these perspectives must become a match. I...
Sep 28, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 196
Listen to this interview of Jo Van Bulck, Assistant Professor in the DistriNet Research Unit, KU Leuven, Belgium. We talk about the paper LVI: Hijacking Transient Execution through Microarchitectural Load Value Injection (S&P 2020). Jo Van Bulck : "For me, this paper is a good example of how just by thinking, we researchers can attain to insights. This is not a paper where we came across something by doing it. No, it was really about thinking, and then coming up with an idea, and then evaluating...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 195
Filling a gap in the literature, Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches (ALA Editions and Core, 2024) provides librarians and catalogers with practical approaches to reparative cataloging as well as a broader understanding of the topic and its place in the technical services landscape. As part of the profession's ongoing EDISJ efforts to redress librarianship’s problematic past, practitioners from across the field are questioning long-held library authorities and sta...
Sep 22, 2024•39 min•Ep. 71
Listen to this interview of Paul Ralph, Professor, Dalhousie University, Canada. We talk about what's wrong with peer review — and how to fix it! Paul Ralph : "We don't want reviewers micromanaging style, complaining about the way the study is written. No, what we want — and need — is for reviewers to focus on the methodological details of the study: Was it done well? Are the results likely to be true?" For more, see Empirical Standards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...
Sep 22, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 194
Princeton University Press publishes some of the best books every year, racking up accolades and launching the careers of thousands of scholars. As an editor at the New Books Network and a frequent host, I love speaking with Princeton UP authors. A striking feature of many PUP books is the quality of writing. Their books are simultaneously detailed and highly readable. No wonder PUP books have found so much success in the past couple years with their push into audio production. One of the key pe...
Sep 20, 2024•29 min•Ep. 193
Listen to this interview of Darja Smite, Professor, and Eriks Klotins, Senior Researcher — both at Software Engineering Research Lab (SERL), Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. We talk about the paper From Collaboration to Solitude and Back: Remote Pair Programming During COVID-19 (Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming 2021). Eriks Klotins : "In research paper publishing, it’s been my experience that especially junior researchers will misunderstand what is expecte...
Sep 17, 2024•57 min•Ep. 192
Listen to this interview of Clemens Dubslaff, Assistant Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands. We talk about the cultural dividing lines between researcher communities, and of course, how to cross those lines into whole new areas of research. Clemens Dubslaff : "One particular thing I would like to see eXplainable Formal Methods (XFM) do is to revisit the many papers from the early 1990s and so on — papers from logic and programming, where we have many things ready alrea...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 191
Listen to this interview of Javier Cámara, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Málaga, Spain. We talk about the paper Cámara et al. Quantitative Verification-Aided Machine Learning: A Tandem Approach for Architecting Self-Adaptive IoT Systems. Javier Cámara : "Yes, it had been an option, at one point during revising, to have the preliminaries up in the paper before the overview of our approach was presented. However, we felt that presenting the preliminaries after ...
Sep 15, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 190
Listen to this interview of Rick Rabiser, Professor for Software Engineering in Cyber-Physical Systems, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. We talk about the relationship of researchers in academia and industry, focusing particularly on the community researching into systems and software product lines (SPL). Rick Rabiser : "When you write your paper, imagine you're explaining what you want to write down to someone in a meeting room on the whiteboard. Because this is what we do in research ...
Sep 14, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 189
Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask. Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book ( Catapult, 2020) by Courtney Maum is a funny, candid guide about breaking into the marketplace. Cutting through the noise, dispelling rumors and remaining positive, Before and After the Book Deal answers questions like: are MFA programs worth the time and money, and how do people actually sit down a...
Sep 12, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 230
Listen to this interview of Marcos Kalinowski, Professor, Department of Informatics, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and also, of Daniel Mendez, Full Professor, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and head of Requirements Engineering at fortiss, Germany. We talk about starting a new track at a prestigious journal, with all the challenges and triumphs such a venture brings. Daniel Mendez : "The reviewing and publishing of research is also a social process. And I kn...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 188
Listen to this interview of Dietmar Pfahl, Professor of Software Engineering, University of Tartu, Estonia. We talk about the interconnections between research and the communication of the research. Dietmar Pfahl : "Reviewers need to be told — and told plainly — the actual relevance of the study. That is why authors will publish better when they really understand how, say, a new approach or technology or method, first off, changes how software is being done, but also how those changes open up ne...
Sep 10, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 187
Listen to this interview of Junhua Ding, Professor of Data Science in the Department of Information Science, University of North Texas. We talk about the part that creativity has to play in the publication of impactful research. Junhua Ding : "Engineering research is different from the sort of pure formal sciences of, say, mathematics, where there may be a theorem to be proved, and then researchers attempt to prove it, and in the process, they provide new methods or directions or even solve the ...
Aug 31, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 186
Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs patrons experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental health problems, substance abuse, and poverty-related ne...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr•Ep. 67
Listen to this interview of Bram Adams, Professor at the School of Computing, Queen's University, Canada. We talk about current developments in peer review, as it is practised in software engineering research. Bram Adams : "As an editor, one thing you want to see in a review is a summary that clearly says, 'Okay, my overall scoring is this, and my reasons for that are (a) these few negative points but also (b) these few positive points.' But that, in my experience, is missing from reviews much m...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 185
Have you been told your draft isn’t ready yet, because you still need to find your argument? We have all gotten that feedback at some point. But what we haven’t been told is how to find our argument. Today we return to The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), with Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, to learn how to find and assemble an argument. Whether you are writing an article, dissertation or a book, ...
Aug 22, 2024•58 min•Ep. 228
Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices. Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now ...
Aug 17, 2024•2 hr 35 min•Ep. 65
Listen to this interview of Anthony Anjorin, a lead software architect at Zühlke Engineering, Germany; and also, Hsiang-Shang Ko, assistant research fellow, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. We talk about their paper Benchmarking bidirectional transformations: Theory, implementation, application, and assessment (Software and Systems Modeling). Anthony Anjorin : "I really believe in the method called peer instruction in teaching. The basic idea is that experts, who deal w...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 184
With My Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate scho...
Aug 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 15
Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other ...
Jul 31, 2024•58 min•Ep. 63
Listen to this interview of Istvan David, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing and Software, Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada. We talk about his coauthored paper "Collaborative Model-Driven Software Engineering – A Systematic Survey of Practices and Needs in Industry" (JSS 2023). Istvan David : "When I read a paper, I like to have a visual excerpt of it — somewhere I can go to find the key messages. This is immediately what I look for, because we al...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 183
How do you turn a dissertation into a book? Today’s book is: The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook: Exercises for Developing and Revising Your Book Manuscript (U Chicago Press, 2023), by Dr. Katelyn E. Knox and Dr. Allison Van Deventer, which offers a series of manageable, concrete steps and exercises to help you revise your academic manuscript into a book. The Dissertation-to-Book Workbook offers clear examples, as well as targeted exercises, checklists and prompts to take all the guesswork out of ...
Jul 25, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 224
What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor? In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic ...
Jul 15, 2024•43 min•Ep. 12
Listen to this interview of Istvan David, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Department of Computing and Software, Faculty of Engineering, McMaster University, Canada; and, Houari Sahraoui, Full Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Canada. We talk about their coauthored paper "Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned" (MODELS 2023). Istvan David : "Making Figure 1, and also all of the text that depends...
Jul 14, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 182
Listen to this interview of Görkem Giray, IT executive and part-time educator in the domain of computer science. We talk about his paper A software engineering perspective on engineering machine learning systems: "A software engineering perspective on engineering machine learning systems: State of the art and challenges" (JSS 2021). Görkem Giray : "By the time I received back the reviews for this paper, I had been working on the topic for over a year. So, that's why, like so many researchers dee...
Jul 13, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 181
