Episodes
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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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Missing episodes?
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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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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 — the place to start if you want to do STGT in your own research
Link to Rashina's TSE paper — the source to cite if your research uses STGT
Link to Rashina's Alt+Pubs — alternative publications beyond the peer-reviewed research paper
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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 toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us.
Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series.
Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don’t have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here.
Other things heard or mentioned in this episode:
“The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020.
“The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg’s Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast.
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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 authors don't even given others a chance to reproduce the results. So, I am not saying that reproducibility has to happen at the push of a button. Of course that would be great. But I also acknowledge that the incentives we have in place now in research publishing and in the academic career do not really favor that approach. On the other hand, if researchers aren't even being given a chance at reproducing something because the data simply aren't available or the algorithm isn't available or there's absolutely no documentation — well then, that is just no good, and it is the kind of scenario where I, as Open Science Editor, will push back on the paper."
This interview is a collaboration between the NBN and the Journal of Systems and Software.
Link to FSE-C paper about Reproducibility Debt
Link to JJS paper about paper links to GitHub
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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 architecture developed, and two, the environment where it's been developed. But why in that order? Why not: Heterogeneous marine data steams using a data-flow oriented software architecture? The answer here is audience, because ICSA is a conference for software architecture, and this team of authors have the contribution of a new architecture here. Therefore, the Title puts the topic first (data-flow oriented software architecture), then adding more about that topic after (heterogeneous marine data streams).
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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. After reading this, we have no further doubt or concern as to the authors' selection of data.
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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 1 as it's presented in the running text. There is definitely a lot to see, but even more that the writing goes into describing and explaining. For that reason, Justus and his coauthors have chosen to do that work using both figure and text. It is the interaction here between the two that makes their study design palpable and visual — a huge help to the reader trying to appreciate just how they have arrived at these three RQs!
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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.”
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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 just get going and do that, without reexplaining and restating things again and again."
Link here to the Digital Sustainability Center
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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, see here
For the gallery of 103 publications, see here
To work at a university press, see here
Anthony Cond is director of Liverpool University Press and president of the Association of University Presses
Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network
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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, what will help you understand this work, what will increase your appreciation of the results or interpretation. Consider, too, your own busy schedule — because your reviewers will be at least as busy as you are. Make the job easier of understanding key ideas, contributions, technical content. It’s not about changing the work, but instead, about framing it all in a clear and usable way.”
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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 chose the right type of text, the right tone in the writing — because in these ways, we were enabled to help people to understand a little bit more about how to use and about when to use LLMs in modeling tasks."
Link to other Expert Voice mentioned in the interview: Towards standardized benchmarks of LLMs in software modeling tasks
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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 collectively for the best result. And for me, personally, I find this hugely motivating, you know, to participate in conference committees.”
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