28 March 2009

Blogs by Researchers

Which researchers are more inclined to blog?

Methodology:

  1. pick a conference/workshop
  2. go thru the program committee (PC) and search for the word "blog" on each homepage
  3. eliminate blogs that don't contain any Computer Science post in the last 5 posts

I do not include the blogs I know about that can't be found using the methodology above. Why? (1) If the same rules are applied to different communities then the results say something about the difference between communities. (2) I want to simulate what an outsider would be able to find with little effort.

Results:

ECOOP: Analysis, design methods and design patterns; Concurrent, real-time or parallel systems; Databases, persistence and transactions; Distributed and mobile systems; Frameworks, product lines and software architectures; Language design and implementation; Testing and metrics; Programming environments and tools; Theoretical foundations, type systems, formal methods; Versioning, compatibility, software evolution; Aspects, Components, Modularity, Reflection; Collaboration, Workflow. PC with 29 people. Blogs:

TACAS: Specification and verification techniques for finite and infinite-state systems; Software and hardware verification; Theorem-proving and model-checking; System construction and transformation techniques; Static and run-time analysis; Abstraction techniques for modeling and validation; Compositional and refinement-based methodologies; Testing and test-case generation; Analytical techniques for secure, real-time, hybrid, critical, biological or dependable systems; Integration of formal methods and static analysis in high-level hardware design or software environments; Tool environments and tool architectures; SAT solvers; Applications and case studies . PC with 29 people. No blog.

FTfJP: specification techniques and interface specification languages; specification of software components and library packages; automated checking and verification of program properties; verification logics; language semantics; program analysis; type systems; security. PC with 15 people. No blog.

STOC: algorithms and data structures; computational complexity; cryptography; privacy; computational geometry; algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics; randomness in computing; parallel and distributed computation; machine learning; applications of logic; algorithmic algebra and coding theory; computational biology; computational game theory; quantum computing and other alternative models of computation; theoretical aspects of areas such as databases, information retrieval, and networks. PC with 24 people. Blogs:

If you apply this to some other conferences I'd be interested in the results. Blogs are a good way for researchers to spread the important ideas in their specialized areas. The rate of researchers with blogs is very low.

[Edit] You may say blogs.py page, where page is the URL of a conference page that contains the program committee, to get a list of probable blogs. This cuts down the manual work a lot (but also misses some blogs, if the authors do not include "blog" in the link text).

4 comments:

William R Cook said...

This is amusing. As an academic a blog is a luxury. I have one because I want to communicate technical ideas to non-academics and influence them to use m research. The thing that always amazes me is now long some blog posts are. Also, I wonder why Laurence Tratt's does not support comments.

rgrig said...

There's a pretty long post explaining why long posts are good. But then again, you're already writing articles that are probably even longer.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Laurence Tratt said...

Hi William. My blog doesn't allow comments partly because it's not a "traditional" blog (I tried that very briefly, before deciding I'd concentrate on longer, more technical articles, a sort of half-way point between a traditional blog and research papers), partly because I was too lazy to code them into the simple blog system I wrote, partly because I didn't want to think about what I was going to do about moderation and so on, and partly because I hoped that people would write substantial responses on their own website. I should probably go back and think again about this approach, although I might still come to the same conclusion I did a few years back. Laurie

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