Your Job Can Be Done Better By My Algorithm

Citation Reams have been written on jobs being replaced by algorithms and by robots running on algorithms. Much of the most impactful writing has come from economists — my two favorite ones are Joseph Stiglitz and Daron Acemoglu, or for a more lay person perspective read this NYTimes article that covers their work. Some of […]

OpenReview: A Positive Direction for Peer Review?

Citation I recently had occasion to use OpenReview as the reviewing platform for a conference. The conference was the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a core Machine Learning conference. I used it both as a reviewer and as an author. OpenReview is a platform that is distinguished by two features: It facilitates dialog between […]

Is Computing a Team Sport?

Most of us, in the field of computing, like to believe we are good team players. This seems not just the politically correct line, but also makes our work more feel more enjoyable [1]. I am encompassing in my discussion a fairly wide swath, those who are in research, both academic and industrial, in the […]

Computer Systems Research: The Joys, the Perils, and How to Count Beans Well

This post was first written for the ACM SIGARCH blog and appeared there on Nov 30, 2020. Thanks to Rajeev (Balasubramonian, University of Utah) for instigating this post and then guiding with helpful prods and suggestions. Citation This post is broadly meant for computer systems researchers, and that is a big tent, including members of […]

The Non-Expert Inventor

As a Computer Scientist, I catch myself sometime, when looking at a wonderful innovative system at work, thinking of the details that went into it. When face-to-face with the wonderful Starship zipping around the Purdue campus delivering food, I am thinking of what software security feature does it have to avoid it being hijacked. When […]