New Category: Research

So I'm going to try to add a new category of posts to this blog for interesting papers in Computer Science related conferences and journals.  One thing that kind of blows my mind about CS lately is that even though we are more "connected" than we have ever been in the past, it really underlines how little overlap there is between the practice of computer science research and the practice of computer science.  In other fields like law and economics, there are plenty of professors and graduate students who constantly blog about what is going on in the research world and how it impacts the real world, but as far as I have seen, there is no equivalent in Computer Science.  Does anyone out there in blogland have any idea why this is?  You would think that a bunch of grad students laboring in obscurity would be thrilled to try to bring their brilliant ideas to the audience of the commercial software world.   Maybe those blogs are out there and I'm just missing them.  Ping me if you see this! 

I've been a little bit out of the loop since I left academia for a product team here at Microsoft, so I see this series as a good way to force myself to keep one toe in the literature and maybe even build some bonds with the researchers out there.  I'm going to start going through the papers on the program at the International Conference on Software Engineering and writing up some summaries of the papers that I find interesting and any comments I might have.  I know there are others out there who are also trying to stay up on the literature.  This could be a good way for us to share the load.