CSER and CASCON

This past Sunday and Monday I went to a meeting of the Consortium for Software Engineering Research (CSER). Popular topics there were empirical software engineering, research ethics, diagnostics, and models and visualization. There were a couple of talks from Peggy Storey and Ian Bull, from the University of Victoria’s Chisel Group, which has built some very cool tools for information visualization that I’ll talk about later. From our own group, Greg Wilson presented Dr Project as a tool to manage undergraduate software teams, which sparked an interesting discussion on student data collection for research. Aaand I presented one of the 22 student posters that graced the reception.

The rest of my week was for CASCON, a free conference put together by the Center for Advanced Studies at IBM. There I went to two social computing workshops – for me, the highlight of the first was Joey deVilla’s refreshing no-powerpoint, democamp-style speech on “Failures 2.0″ (“go out there and flop!”, he yelled); and I very much enjoyed the second workshop’s panel discussion between web 2.0 evangelists and some healthily skeptic audience members. The downside, however, is that I’m still numb from drinking so much web 2.0 kool-aid. My delicate brain must have heard the term (and its crazy Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, and Collaboration 2.0 variants) literally hundreds of times. Yuk.

Dagstuhl

Last week I was in Germany for a Dagstuhl Seminar on Methods for Modelling Software Systems. It was both quite fun and quite productive. I had the chance to talk to researchers whose work I’ve been studying since I started my Ph.D., and to get feedback from them regarding my own interests.

I guess part of the success of Dagstuhl seminars is that the environment is much more informal and flexible than that of a conference. There’s no official program prior to the start of the seminar. Talks and discussions can be added along the way. At lunch and at dinner, you’re assigned to tables randomly, so you get to hear perspectives from several people instead of joining the same clique all the time. And since Dagstuhl is basically in the middle of nowhere, there’s not much to do at the end of the day other than to visit one of the castle’s rooms and chat with other participants over cheese and wine.

In comparison, the conference format feels somewhat broken: There’s very little time for people to present their stuff, there’s too much going on at once, and the emphasis is on defending and selling your work rather than on exploring it and poking around to improve it. On the other hand, however, a big conference can hold a few thousands of participants, whereas a Dagstuhl seminar, I guess, would break down with over 50 people.

What is this all about?

I hereby declare that this shall be a blog about:

• Seemingly disconnected research in Cognitive Science, Psychology, Sociology and Human Factors
• The way all these disciplines come together and impact Software Engineering
• The silliness of my poor little mind, thinking it can study and measure all these very fuzzy interactions in time to finish a Ph.D.
• …and about other stuff that I’ll make up as I go along

I hereby also declare that you should enjoy it. You have no choice! Cheers!