To appear at CCSC

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Wednesday 19 March 2008 @22:53

In April, I will be presenting a new paper — Something for Everyone: AI Lab Assignments that Span Learning Styles and Aptitudes — at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, held in the exotic, distant locale of Staten Island. A preprint can be found in the publications section of my site.

I will be building a repository and wiki about the assignments. With any luck, it will be available in time for the presentation. Shown here are some photos from our Connect 4 tournament during the first year I used these lab assignments.

Two papers posted

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Friday 21 December 2007 @10:00

Thanks to changedetection.com, I noticed this morning that our RNGzip paper went up on the site of Academy Publisher — JCP volume 2, number 10. JCP is open-access, so the full text can be downloaded by anyone.

I also decided to post my own full-text version of the graph-theory paper to appear in Congressus Numerantium. I believe that’s acceptable according to the copyright terms, but I suppose I ought to read the fine print. See my publications page.

One other paper (on CS education) is under review right now, and there’s a draft (on types in compilation) that’s nearly ready for submission. I hope to hear about the former and work on the latter over winter break.

End of summer

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Tuesday 11 September 2007 @8:59

I was in denial about it for as long as possible, but yesterday my classes began. I can’t pretend it’s still summer anymore. Although the summer wasn’t nearly as productive as I planned back in May (I believe in aiming high; realistic goals are for weak minds ), I did get two papers accepted and I made progress on a new manuscript that I’d like to submit by mid-October.

I also sharpened my tools, battled a web-spam invasion, built a new home computer, and changed my web host. Didn’t travel very far this summer, but we hit Block Island (RI) in May, and Boston and Montréal for a few days each in August. In the coming weeks and months, I plan to finish final revisions on my RNGzip paper for JCP, pound out the new manuscript with Stefan, organize my coursework ideas for AI and write something about that, and, of course, submit my tenure portfolio. Oh, and I’ll be going to Germany for ICFP.

MetaOCaml proof

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Tuesday 23 May 2006 @18:11

No, not proof of a theorem… a pre-print from Elsevier, the publisher of my MetaOCaml paper. It arrived by email this morning. So far, practically all of my publications are with ACM or Springer. This is the first that will appear in ScienceDirect. I almost feel like a real scientist.

Without digressing too much on the role of scientific publishers in the Internet age, one thing I do enjoy is getting back a proof that looks like a proper article. Whether it’s due to the banner, or little widgets they add in the header and footer, or just a typeface other than Computer Modern or Times, at least it looks like it was touched by a publishing house since I submitted it.

I’m reminded of visiting technical and academic bookstores when I was still an undergrad, or the first years of grad school. I would pick up a slim $90, 180-page treatise by some professor, and be disappointed when it looked exactly like what I could have printed out myself if only I had access to the .tex file: the Computer Modern typeface and LaTeX book class, with all the default settings. Not that these are necessarily ugly, they’re just not special. For $90 a copy, is it too much to ask that the publisher hire a designer?

The strange thing with this paper is that I used the LaTeX document class provided by Elsevier for my manuscript, and it looked like garbage. It was full of widows and orphans and huge irregular spaces between paragraphs. One of the reviewers even commented, “this can’t possibly be done by TeX.” I was indeed embarrassed by the typography, and I could have fixed it, but I chose not to stray from the publisher’s settings.

Maybe their public document class is intentionally crummy. That way, when you get back the real proofs, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It will look like they actually did something in exchange for you relinquishing your copyright…

CASSIS paper published

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Friday 28 April 2006 @17:48

Just now, a lovely message landed in my inbox from Heidelberg. It was a brief notice that our CASSIS paper now appears on the Springer web site, and is available for ordering. So I finally have page numbers and a publication date!

We are very pleased to be the first to congratulate you on the electronic publication of your article ‘Typed Compilation Against Non-manifest Base Classes’ published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. If your institution has access to this journal, you may view your paper at: dx.doi.org.

This was initially a presentation at a workshop back in March 2005, but selected speakers were invited to submit a paper for the proceedings, which was then peer-reviewed and published in LNCS volume 3956. My thanks go out to the editors, reviewers, and to my co-author Stefan. Cheers!

Research pages ported

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Sunday 23 April 2006 @16:33

My research pages have now been ported to the new site design. I’m proudest of the publication list, which now contains nifty JavaScript doodads to reorganize the list without waiting for a round-trip to my server. Try the ‘Research’ tab at the top of the page.

This also serves as the first post in a few significant WordPress categories (aka topics, aka tags). I will post to the ‘publications’ topic whenever I add a new publication to the list, and I will post to ‘talks’ to announce upcoming talks. Finally, the ‘research’ topic will be for any ideas, commentary, or other tidbits that are relevant to my research interests.