A Canadian Guide to the Heartbleed Bug

What is the Heartbleed Bug? The Heartbleed bug is a recently identified bug in the OpenSSL security protocol toolkit. OpenSSL is widely used on web servers to encrypt user data.In general, software bugs are computer program error that cause the software to behave in an unexpected way (e.g., crash, produce a wrong output). Security bugs are aContinue reading “A Canadian Guide to the Heartbleed Bug”

What’s New for Concurrency in Java SE 8?

Java SE 8 was officially released yesterday (March 18th) and given the fact that Java 7 was released back in 2012, there are definitely lots of updates and new features. These updates include improvements to the Java language itself, Java security, Java tools and more. Although a lot of these updates are interesting and importantContinue reading “What’s New for Concurrency in Java SE 8?”

A Computer Science Professor’s Backpack

Every morning I read through my favourite technology blogs and one series of blog posts that I confess to enjoying are the Featured Bag posts on Lifehacker. These are basically a series of posts where different people from different jobs/walks of life describe the kind of bag they use and what they keep inside it.Continue reading “A Computer Science Professor’s Backpack”

Advice on Finding Relevant Research Papers

One of the questions I often get asked by new research students in my lab is how can they find research papers that are relevant to their thesis. For a student new to research this can be a very daunting task and doing a straight Google, Bing or Yahoo search generates a lot of noiseContinue reading “Advice on Finding Relevant Research Papers”

Hiring attributes used at Google

Today I read an op-ed article in the New York Times titled “How To Get a Job at Google”. The article cites an interview with Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations, and identifies the five hiring attributes that Google considers when evaluating potential job applicants:

Interesting Quotes from AMD Canada Event

On March 7th of last year I attended an OCE event called the “AMD HSA and Heterogeneous Computing Research Showcase.” I recently came across my notes from the event and I thought a few quotes from the keynote speaker, Phil Rogers from AMD Canada,  were worth sharing. Phil Rogers on AMD’s commitment to open industryContinue reading “Interesting Quotes from AMD Canada Event”

Empirical Methods Should Guide the Development of New Software Engineering Tools

The following quote is one of my favorite quotes regarding the right way to conduct Software Engineering (SE) research. It summarizes the importance of utilizing empirical methods to inspire and guide the development of new SE tools and techniques: “In all fields of SE, empirical methods should enable the development of scientific knowledge about howContinue reading “Empirical Methods Should Guide the Development of New Software Engineering Tools”

Predicting Mutation Scores

Last week my MSc student, Kevin Jalbert, presented his early thesis results at the Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE 2012). The workshop took place in Zurich Switzerland and was colocated with ICSE 2012. The title of the presentation (and the paper that appears in the proceedings) was “Predicting Mutation Score Using SourceContinue reading “Predicting Mutation Scores”

Good Resources for Learning to Program with Concurrency

With the increase in multicore processors there has been an increase in demand for concurrent programming and an increase in books and resources that focus on programming with concurrency. Below I will outline some of the books on my own bookshelf that have been useful.

The Importance of Incremental Research

Last year Bertrand Meyer authored a post titled Long Live Incremental Research! at BLOG@CACM. Rather then writing my own post on the topic, I instead want to encourage people to read Meyer’s post as I think he does a great job of summarizing the importance of approaching research incrementally and not aiming for the next great breakthrough. A few quotesContinue reading “The Importance of Incremental Research”