We are seeing the glimmer of light, at the end of a seemingly endless dark tunnel. We will soon be back to our real offices and our real classrooms and our real labs, rather than having to make do with the confines of a few monitors perched on our table. We will again be surrounded […]
Category: Academic Life
Reflections on a Foray into MOOC
I had dipped my toe into MOOC (Massive Open Online Courseware) teaching years back but had not plunged in till this past semester. Circumstances forced me (as many of us) to plunge into remote teaching with full gusto. I launched my graduate level class called “Big Data for Reliability and Security” into the ether via […]
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 […]
Short Take: Review Paper or Next New Idea?
Should you concentrate on writing a review article on an area of study that you know well or move on to the next new idea of yours, perhaps even a small new idea? The allure of going on to the next new shiny toy … errrr idea, is strong. To me there is a valued […]
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 […]
Short Take: Big Data and IoT in Practice
Citation Beyond the tremendous level of activity around big data (data science, machine learning, data analytics, … take your pick of the term) in research circles, I wanted to peek into some of the use cases for its adoption in the industries that deal with physical things, as opposed to digital objects. And draw some […]
Technology in Education, or Technology vs. Education
Citation Teaching at a research university, I see a slew of high-tech gadgets, or even low-tech ones, that we are asked to consider to enhance the educational experience of our students. As a broader theme, some technologies have been put up as disrupting the “traditional” college mode of education dating way back to the turn […]
7 Habits of Highly Effective Graduate Students
As a professor I know how much of the fun I have in my work and the success of my efforts depends on super human graduate students who do research in my group. And that is a rhetorical question. The answer is a lot, perhaps the single most important factor. So doubtless I, and all my faculty colleagues, spend a lot of cycles thinking about which graduate students to select and then observing how they work on their research tasks and then working with them so that they are even more effective. So here is my distillation of the qualities that I see among the successful graduate students. Like the original list of 7 habits of effective people, this one too does not apply to all successful graduate students. But I would hazard a guess that if you do not have a good many of these 7 habits, you are unlikely to succeed as a graduate researcher. Also I want to stay away from “motherhood and apple pie” kind of generic golden qualities, which we all instinctively know are good, but want to be more specific.
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Hype Cycle in Research
Citation We all know that some technical topics become hot, stay hot for some length of time, and then fade away from attention in academia, and the research world more generally. And then there are some topics that stay more stable for extended periods of time, for say one career span of years. This post […]
What’s Multitasking Doing to Me?
Citation We believe that multitasking is the essential ingredient to being healthy, wealthy, and happy. We do it incessantly in our work lives and even in our personal lives. While conversing with the person across the dinner table, our Google Glass, or if you have upgraded, the VR goggle, keeps telling you of the latest […]
