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...
Dec 28, 2024•42 min•Ep. 228
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 w...
Dec 28, 2024•41 min•Ep. 227
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,...
Dec 25, 2024•46 min•Ep. 226
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...
Dec 21, 2024•42 min•Ep. 225
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 simi...
Dec 16, 2024•44 min•Ep. 224
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 pragma...
Dec 15, 2024•54 min•Ep. 221
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...
Dec 13, 2024•41 min•Ep. 222
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 d...
Dec 09, 2024•43 min•Ep. 221
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 poin...
Dec 07, 2024•43 min•Ep. 220
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 back...
Dec 03, 2024•52 min•Ep. 219
In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we’re listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It’s about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn’t just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it’s a competition of audibility and vocal toughne...
Dec 02, 2024•31 min•Ep. 34
Listen to this interview of Rashina Hoda, Professor of Software Engineering, Monash University, Australia. We talk about Rashina's pioneering work in the methodology called socio-technical grounded theory. Rashina Hoda : "In terms of selecting reviewers, it's important to talk not just about topic alignment but also crucially, about methodology alignment as well. Because that is just so important for any reviewer to be able to do justice to the work in front of them." Link to Rashina's book — th...
Dec 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 218
Listen to this interview of Christoph Treude, Open Science Editor at the Journal of Systems and Software, and also Associate Professor of Computer Science, Singapore Management University, Singapore. Christoph Treude : "One good heuristic for deciding whether the research is reproducible is this: Have the authors given others a fair chance at reproducing the results? Because, for me now, particularly in my role as Open Science Editor, I feel that the papers I push back on are the ones where the ...
Nov 30, 2024•50 min•Ep. 217
Listen to this interview of Keila Lima, PhD candidate, Department of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. We talk about her coauthored paper A Data-Flow Oriented Software Architecture for Heterogeneous Marine Data Streams (ICSA 2024). Download this screenshot of the paper. In the screenshot, you see green highlighting that picks out the function word which divides the two parts of this work: one, the arch...
Nov 27, 2024•54 min•Ep. 216
Listen to this interview of Omer Akgul, postdoctoral researcher, CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about his coauthored paper Investigating Influencer VPN Ads on YouTube (SP 2022). Download this screenshot of the paper. In the screenshot, you see yellow highlighting that continues the meso-level argumentation of the Introduction. We, the readers, are now brought inside of one particular kind of ad on YouTube — and crucially, as well, we are told explicitly why those ads in particular. A...
Nov 24, 2024•50 min•Ep. 215
Listen to this interview of Justus Bogner, Assistant Professor, Software and Sustainability Group, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands. We talk about his coauthored papers Do RESTful API design rules have an impact on the understandability of Web APIs? (EMSE 2023) and RESTRuler: Towards Automatically Identifying Violations of RESTful Design Rules in Web APIs (ICSA 2024). Download this screenshot of the ICSA paper. In the screenshot, you see blue highlighting that matches content portrayed by Figure ...
Nov 17, 2024•47 min•Ep. 213
Listen to this interview of Gilles Perrouin, FNRS Research Associate, University of Namur, Belgium. We talk about the community focused around research in systems variability. Gilles Perrouin : "If a community want a research topic to live — even thrive — over time, then it's a must that new PhD students be attracted to that research.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 16, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 213
Listen to this interview of Markus Funke, PhD Candidate in the Software and Sustainability Group, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands. We talk about his coauthored paper Carving Sustainability into Architecture Knowledge Practice (ECSA 2023). Markus Funke : "I find that one excellent way for avoiding unnecessary repetition in the text is to use the opening of each section or subsection to state plainly what you're going to do and why you’re going to do it that way — because then you can ju...
Nov 10, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 212
The Association of University Presses (AUPresses), a global organization of 161 mission-driven publishers, is proud to announce a collection of 123 books, journals, and projects that embody the #StepUP theme of this year’s University Press Week, happening Nov. 11 to 15. The featured publications, curated by AUPresses members in 12 countries, present thought-provoking concepts, new points of view, and inspiring ideas, many of which advocate for social change. For a complete list of UP Week events...
Nov 06, 2024•43 min•Ep. 211
Listen to this interview of Michael Felderer, Director of the Institute of Software Technology, German Aerospace Center; and also, Professor of Computer Science, University of Cologne, Germany. We talk about those interdependencies between science and engineering which make the base of software research. Michael Felderer : "When preparing your manuscript for submission, try to imagine reviewers’ expectations — really imagine, for example, what you would expect if you were the reviewer. So ask, w...
Oct 27, 2024•55 min•Ep. 210
Listen to this interview of Javier Cámara and Lola Burgueño — both Associate Professors, ITIS Software, University of Málaga, Spain. We talk about their coauthored paper On the assessment of generative AI in modeling tasks: an experience report with ChatGPT and UML (SoSyM 2023). Lola Burgueño : "Yes, we're definitely pleased that we went for a timely piece like the Expert Voice at SoSyM — because after seeing how we've reached people and seeing, too, how people are citing the paper, we think we ...
Oct 24, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 209
Listen to this interview of Georgios Bouloukakis, Associate Professor at Télécom SudParis / Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France. We talk about the community in middleware systems research, and in particular, about the distinguishing marks of a top contribution in that field. Georgios Bouloukakis : "You know, what’s so impressive about the PerCom conference and all such high-quality conferences — it’s this whole set of people, the PC members and the organizing committee — everyone working col...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 208
Listen to this interview of Paul Gazzillo, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Central Florida. We talk about peer reviewing at conferences versus journals, and we talk about how different venues define research problems differently. Paul Gazzillo : "One important purpose of scientific publication is novel contributions. And so, applying logic to that, you can disprove that something's a contribution by demonstrating that it's unsound. But as to novelty — well, it's very hard ...
Oct 20, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 207
Listen to this interview of Gabriela Michelon, Software Engineer and Project Manager for AI-driven Product Development at Marquardt Group, Germany. We talk about the career path for software engineers, and we talk, too, about how the gap might be closed between research and practice. Gabriela Michelon : "When a company has a research program for PhDs, it’s an empowered way of showing just how the company values the research and as well, researcher efforts. That way, the company really shows how ...
Oct 19, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 206
Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful tha...
Oct 17, 2024•56 min•Ep. 190
Listen to this interview of Alessio Bucaioni, Associate Professor, Mälardalen University, Sweden. We talk about his coauthored paper Continuous Conformance of Software Architectures (ICSA 2024). Alessio Bucaioni : "Yeah, I agree: A plethora of definitions for the same thing or concept may very well slow down progress in the research. And actually, I think that this issue is peculiar to software engineering, perhaps computer science more generally — because if you think about the branches of scie...
Oct 16, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 205
Listen to this interview of Alessio Bucaioni, Associate Professor, Mälardalen University, Sweden. We talk about his coauthored paper Technical Architectures for Automotive Systems (ICSA 2020). Alessio Bucaioni : "For Conclusion sections, I like to cater to a reader approaching our paper who’s pressed for time. So, that means, I want to enable this reader to understand our work just by reading the Abstract, the Introduction, and the Conclusion. So, I try to get the Conclusion to bond well with th...
Oct 14, 2024•57 min•Ep. 254
Listen to this interview of Enxhi Ferko, PhD student, and Alessio Bucaioni, Associate Professor — both at Mälardalen University, Sweden. We talk about their coauthored paper Standardisation in Digital Twin Architectures in Manufacturing (ICSA 2023). Enxhi Ferko : "What really pleases me about this study is, sure, our contributions have proven interesting and useful to both academics and practitioners. But we were happy to reach, as well, even a third group of stakeholders, namely, the people inv...
Oct 13, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 203
Listen to this interview of Dimitrios Tsoukalas, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Information Technologies Institute of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Greece; and Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, Professor and Vice Rector, University of Macedonia, Greece. We talk about their two coauthored papers, Machine Learning for Technical Debt Identification, and Local and Global Explainability for Technical Debt Identification. Alexander Chatzigeorgiou : "I think that it is important in eve...
Oct 11, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 202
Subatomic Writing: Six Fundamental Lessons to Make Language Matter (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), by Johns Hopkins University instructor Jamie Zvirzdin, is a guide for writing about science—from the subatomic level up! Subatomic Writing teaches that the building blocks of language are like particles in physics. These particles, combined and arranged, form something greater than their parts: all matter in the literary universe. This interdisciplinary approach helps scientists, science writers, and edi...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 235
