A lot of Computer Science courses seem to be running Law modules as standard, in order to teach students about things like The Data Protection Act, Copyright, etc. Realistically, is Law an important subject for Computer Scientists or Programmers? Did you take Law or take a Law class whilst studying for a CS related degree? If you did, d...
If you work as a professional programmer, how much does the world of academia directly affect the work you do (I'm ignoring indirect effects such as programming language features that have worked their way into your languages)? Do you ever pull up and read journal papers? Do you listen to talks by academics or communicate with them? Have...
I'm currently working on my Bachelors dissertation. This involves developing a software product and a 12000 word write-up, mainly covering research, design and development. Now where I am quoting other peoples written work, I am obviously referencing this, but what about code? There have been plenty of times where I've looked for a solut...
Greetings everyone. I'm a senior at a Computer Science program. Our group is having trouble deciding what do to for our final project, as we all have varying backgrounds and interests. The requirements are very open; it could be anything from a research intensive machine learning project to a Silverlight game. The project must be re...
I'm playing around with machine learning in an academic setting, and it's really fun. I'm wondering how machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines make it into software applications. Do people actually use machine learning algorithms? Do you use them because it's part of a spec written by someone else, or are they more o...
I've implemented a newer GC algorithm and thought my findings could help. What should I do? Publish a blog? Do my best to write a paper and/or just start submitting abstracts to journals? I don't have any academic credentials myself. Should I start emailing local Professors to see if they could help me write it? Email professors w...
I'm trying to understand an academic paper (pdf) about programming language design. In particular, it describes a lightweight version of Java called Featherweight Java. It has typing rules with notation like this: x_ : C_, this : C |- e0 : E0 E0 <: C0 class C extends D {...} if mtype(m,D) = D_->D0, then C_ = D_ and C0 = D0 -----...
I lead a small group of programmers in a university setting, having just moved into this position last year. While the majority of our team are full time employees, we have a couple of people who are traditionally graduate assistants. The competition for these assistantships is fairly intense, as they get free graduate school tuition o...
Disclaimer: I know you're not a lawyer! :) This question is for university assignments, not work nor personal. Say I'm looking for the implementation of something very very specific, and I find that in an open source project (say, using google code search). The thing itself is about 20 ~ 30 lines of code, and constitutes less than 10%...
I'm unclear about legal status of utilizing an algorithm from a published academic paper. Is there an implicit patent over that material? How about open source applications? Would it be ok to implement that algorithm in an open source app, with one of free software licenses? Let's say I have access to paper A which describes algorithm ...
I'm currently taking a class, and I'd like to release the software I've developed for it under the GPL. It's nothing special (in my opinion), but someone might find some use for it. I was wondering if I'm somehow restricted because I did it as a class assignment? Also, to what extent would the restrictions apply. Am I not allowed to ...
I'm doing some preliminary work in investigating how DVCS (the likes of Git, Hg, Bazar) can help in the process of scientific programming, especially for graduate students. I think I'm in quite a good position for this since I've been programming for quite a few years and is currently starting a Masters program in a natural science. The ...
Hi all. I'm given a string which contains an arbitrary amount of code. I want to calculate a number which represents the code complexity of that string. Something like: int complexity = Lib.FindComplexity(someString); I realize there are a lot of tools out there that will do this for you. These tools will not work for me, because...
I know this may seem a strange question, but pretty soon I have to give a presentation on my project and I'm gonna have to explain why it doesn't work as was specified. I'm worried I will lose grades due to missing the spec, and I suppose I should technically, but this project in my opinion was overly difficult for the timespan. This is...
Hopefully, I'm going to finish my undergraduate studies next semester and I'm thinking about the topic of my final project. And yes, I've read the questions with duplicate title. I'm asking this from a bit different viewpoint, so it's not an exact dupe. I've spent at least half of my life coding stuff in different languages and framewor...
I currently am a student worker at a medium sized university. i work for the college of science (includes math, stat, comp sci, physics, chem, and biology) and as a "technician"; which basically is a catch all for basic trouble shooting and fixing faculty computer, setting up computer labs, writing custom programs, and administrating web...
Hi, I am writing an academic project about extremely long functions in the Linux kernel. For that purpose, I am looking for examples for real-life functions that are extremely long (few hundreds of lines of code), that you don't consider bad programming (i.e., they won't benefit from decomposition or usage of a dispatch table). Have y...
What topic or idea would you suggest for an MS Computer Science thesis? ...
Hello. As part of the work in our research lab, we often code up simple/complex implementations of various algorithms and give them away with a simple "Acknowledgment Request desired, if used" message in the code itself. I want to release them under a proper Open-Source licenses, so as to prevent undesired misuse and also enable others t...
How do you evaluate publications? Im currently searching for a CS research topic and reading various papers. My dilemma on reading a paper usually is - is it really worthwhile continuing research in this topic? what are the indicators of impact of research? btw, im currently interested in - Liveness analysis. what do you think of it?...