Listen to this interview of Bran Selic, President and Founder, Malina Software Corporation, Canada. We talk about publishing at ECMFA — that is, at the European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications.

Bran Selic : "My experience in both industry and academia has taught me that most innovation actually comes from industry, because industry practitioners live in a competitive environment: it's, advance the state-of-the-art, or die. This forces practitioners to innovate in very pragmatic ways, meaning, to innovate with their products and in their domains. So, that is why I see the role of conferences like ECMFA as serving as a place where researchers can explore how innovations might be generalized, systematized, and ultimately, more clearly understood."

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Listen to this interview of Tim Menzies, Editor in Chief, Automated Software Engineering, and also, Full Professor, Computer Science, North Carolina State University. We talk about academic venues that target an industry audience, and we talk about one of his papers at just such a venue, Shockingly Simple: "Keys" for Better AI for SE (SW 2021).

Tim Menzies : "Researchers in SE should study their profession and their venues as much as they study their research. There are linguistic conventions in how we represent ideas — and you can present the same ideas, the same challenges, the same results in different formats so that these are acceptable to different audiences. The point is, you’re allowed to say what you want to say — only, you need to pay that forum the courtesy of studying how they speak and understand things."

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Listen to this interview of Soheil Khodayari, researcher at CISPA, and Giancarlo Pellegrino, faculty also at CISPA — the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany. We talk about their coauthored paper The Great Request Robbery: An Empirical Study of Client-side Request Hijacking Vulnerabilities on the Web (SP 2024).

Giancarlo Pellegrino : "One the challenges here we certainly discussed a lot was, How do we tell our reader what's new in this work? And so, for example, in section 9, our discussion and conclusion — we begin at the current state, that is, at the things our reader knows right now, before our paper has become part of common knowledge. Well, in our case, that knowledge was client-side CSFR, because it was that only instance of request hijacking really known of, and so we begin there."

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Listen to this interview of Christof Ebert, managing director, Vector Consulting Services, Germany; and also, member on the Editorial Boards of IEEE Software and Journal of Systems and Software. We talk about the gap between academia and industry — and we talk, too, about how to bridge that gap.

Christof Ebert : "As in all scientific research, we software engineers need, too, the basic research. But I'd say a distinguishing feature of our field is the trigger point. For example, the trigger point for search algorithms becoming a discipline — well, that was the outcome, really, of Google. It wasn't, primarily, a phenomenon of any university — of course, the inventors of Google came from university backgrounds, but it was the founding of the company that actually innovated the whole search discipline. And this sort of this just happens again and again in computing and computer science."

This interview is a collaboration between the NBN and the Journal of Systems and Software.

Link to IEEE Software From Idea to Impact

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Listen to this interview of Jiaxun Cao, PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, Duke University. We talk about her coauthored paper Understanding Parents’ Perceptions and Practices Toward Children’s Security and Privacy in Virtual Reality (SP 2024).

Download this screenshot and this screenshot of the paper.

In the screenshots, you see red highlighting that shows the purposes for citing a particular work. For example, in Related Work, the authors aim to lead their reader to the relevant background knowledge (e.g., by saying, “Previous studies have collectively pointed out that…). On the other hand, in the Discussion, the authors aim at drawing together all of that knowledge and the knowledge this study now creates (e.g., by saying, “We believe this phenomenon may be attributed to…”).

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In this first episode of a three-part series called Voices, we’re listening to the sound of American football—specifically the role of voices in the NFL. We start with a rather quirky story from NFL history that speaks to how the voice intersects with our ideologies around both disability and gender. It’s about a player whose voice stopped working the way it once did, revealing that football isn’t just a competition between teams on the gridiron—it’s a competition of audibility and vocal toughness. And like the rest of our Voices series, it opens up fascinating questions about what a voice actually is, what it does, and what it means, to us and to those around us. 

Our guest is Travis Vogan, a prolific sports media scholar at the University of Iowa. Vogan has written books on ABC Sports, ESPN, boxing movies, and those “voice of God” NFL Films. We also hear briefly from sound scholar Jonathan Sterne, who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode of this Voices series.

Some of this episode is based on the article “The 12th Man: Fan Noise in the Contemporary NFL,” published in Popular Communication by Mack Hagood and Travis Vogan in 2016. If you don’t have institutional access, you can also find the PDF here.

Other things heard or mentioned in this episode:

“The Wild Story of the 49ers, Steve DeBerg, and a Shoulder-Pad Speaker System,” by Eric Branch, San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2020.

“The UNBELIEVABLE Story of Steve DeBerg’s Loudspeaker Shoulder Pads,” by the Pick Six Podcast.

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Listen to this interview of Rashina Hoda, Professor of Software Engineering, Monash University, Australia. We talk about Rashina's pioneering work in the methodology called socio-technical grounded theory.

Rashina Hoda : "In terms of selecting reviewers, it's important to talk not just about topic alignment but also crucially, about methodology alignment as well. Because that is just so important for any reviewer to be able to do justice to the work in front of them."

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Listen to this interview of Christoph Treude, Open Science Editor at the Journal of Systems and Software, and also Associate Professor of Computer Science, Singapore Management University, Singapore.

Christoph Treude : "One good heuristic for deciding whether the research is reproducible is this: Have the authors given others a fair chance at reproducing the results? Because, for me now, particularly in my role as Open Science Editor, I feel that the papers I push back on are the ones where the authors don't even given others a chance to reproduce the results. So, I am not saying that reproducibility has to happen at the push of a button. Of course that would be great. But I also acknowledge that the incentives we have in place now in research publishing and in the academic career do not really favor that approach. On the other hand, if researchers aren't even being given a chance at reproducing something because the data simply aren't available or the algorithm isn't available or there's absolutely no documentation — well then, that is just no good, and it is the kind of scenario where I, as Open Science Editor, will push back on the paper."

This interview is a collaboration between the NBN and the Journal of Systems and Software.

Link to FSE-C paper about Reproducibility Debt

Link to JJS paper about paper links to GitHub

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Listen to this interview of Keila Lima, PhD candidate, Department of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway. We talk about her coauthored paper A Data-Flow Oriented Software Architecture for Heterogeneous Marine Data Streams (ICSA 2024).

Download this screenshot of the paper.

In the screenshot, you see green highlighting that picks out the function word which divides the two parts of this work: one, the architecture developed, and two, the environment where it's been developed. But why in that order? Why not: Heterogeneous marine data steams using a data-flow oriented software architecture? The answer here is audience, because ICSA is a conference for software architecture, and this team of authors have the contribution of a new architecture here. Therefore, the Title puts the topic first (data-flow oriented software architecture), then adding more about that topic after (heterogeneous marine data streams).

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Listen to this interview of Omer Akgul, postdoctoral researcher, CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University. We talk about his coauthored paper Investigating Influencer VPN Ads on YouTube (SP 2022).

Download this screenshot of the paper.

In the screenshot, you see yellow highlighting that continues the meso-level argumentation of the Introduction. We, the readers, are now brought inside of one particular kind of ad on YouTube — and crucially, as well, we are told explicitly why those ads in particular. After reading this, we have no further doubt or concern as to the authors' selection of data.

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