Work on Patrick Lam

January: teaching

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yet more course prep, a trip to Pohara and Angelus, and Quebec for Christmas.

December: Wellington, Pohara/Angelus, and Quebec

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yet more course prep, a trip to Pohara and Angelus, and Quebec for Christmas.

November: Wellington

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Time for course preparation, plus another paper submission.

October: Wellington, Ontario, and Whitehorse

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly NSERC Discovery Grant editing, plus a Wilderness First Responder recert and the Ontario Open.

September: South Island and Auckland, as well as Wellington

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some domestic NZ travel (more skiing than usual) and then just work (research and service) as normal.

August: Europe, Canada, then back to New Zealand despite an Air Canada strike

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Grenoble, Montreal, Beaver Valley, stuck in Ontario, and then Auckland. Master’s graduates +1. Lots of service and volunteering.

July: more travels and some scholarly outputs

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mount Olympus (Greece), the Tour du Mont Blanc, and a VSTTE submission.

June: more travels and some scholarly outputs

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Trips to Gold Coast and mostly Seoul (also Shanghai and Narita); submitted a paper.

May: exams and travels

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First month of Spring term; off to Montreal, Estonia, Calgary, and New Zealand!

Trip report: Estonia, May 2-12 2025

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Research visit to Tartu, passing through Tallinn. First time back in Europe since 2019.

April: exams and travels

Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Still had exams to give but was able to start moving on with my life this month.

March: last bit of the term (a doozy)

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I guess it’s accumulated work catching up with me towards the end of the term, such that, despite having no trips longer than a weekend, free time was at a premium.

February: still teaching three courses, plus a hiking trip to Japan

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

OK, this month had a trip to Japan. Aside from that, I got to Toronto once, and to Kingston just at the end of the month. February is a short month, though.

January: a month of teaching three courses, and two trips

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well, that was a whole month. Arrived in Canada on January 6. Teaching ECE 459×2 and SE 465, and had two weekend trips the next two weekends. A bit less busy now.

December: Last month of sabbatical and two trips

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Back on the move, with a trip to the South Island and a trip to the Pacific Islands (French Polynesia), before returning to Canada to teach in the Winter 2025 semester.

November: almost all in Wellington

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a contrast from October, all but the last two days in Wellington.

October: world tour continues with Flagstaff, Waterloo/Toronto, Pasadena, and Winnipeg

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Two conferences with three presentations, three tournaments, and lots of hours in flights.

September: final versions of papers, course prep, Auckland, and Japan

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly in Wellington except for a weekend in Auckland and a week in Tokyo (the start of a busy travel month). Finalizing papers, reviewing course notes.

August: Camera-ready month, and some weekend trips

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Routine month with work finalizing accepted papers and trips to Rotorua and the Catlins, as well as helping with a Snowcraft course at Whakapapa.

July: A walk on the Old Ghost Road and a visit to Melbourne and Cairns, plus a workshop paper submission

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Travels continued with another tramp on the South Island and a trip to Australia. Research continues with a submission to HATRA and revisions of our paper on race freedom verification.

June: an accept, two rejects, another paper submission, and a South Island walk

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Some work, though mostly waiting and advising and not paper writing. More than half the month on the road, in Tasmania and on the South Island (again, not Cascade Saddle, but we did go on a boat in Doubtful Sound.)

May: waiting for reviews; Tasmania and South Island trips

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

April: Whanganui Journey, three papers submitted, and a trip to Tasmania

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Another new place: Tasmania (recommended!). Between the two trips, I did a bunch of work, which I hope will pay off: three paper submissions. Just life as usual.

March: more bad professional news from 2023 efforts, Canada trip, Wānaka climbing, and start of the Whanganui River Journey

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In from Sydney, out to Vancouver, with a hike in the middle, and some research and service.

February: Travers-Sabine; and, entering NZ at the start and leaving NZ at the end

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In from Sydney, out to Vancouver, with a hike in the middle, and some research and service.

Trip report: refereeing in Abbotsford, Edmonton, and a quick trip to Toronto/Waterloo

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

March has two Canadian circuit judo tournaments: Pacific International and Edmonton International. I also stopped by Waterloo for two days and took care of some business.

January: Nelson, Wellington, other Nelson, and Sydney

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m really not experiencing large blocks of unstructured time right now, particularly with all the reviewing I’m doing. But it is true that I don’t have any teaching to prepare, at least.

In any case, I haven’t had time to write the January report, or a report on all of 2023, having been in Sydney and then almost immediately onto the Travers-Sabine Circuit in early February. Well, February is only half over! Though at this rate I should start the March report.

December: taking all the courses

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Travel month with Wilderness First Responder and Avalanche Skills Training 2, and Christmas in Montreal.

November: almost entirely staying put in Wellington

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

PLDI submission and trip to New Caledonia. Just the routine.

October: NSERC Discovery Grant writing, and refereeing in Canada

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly working on a NSERC Discovery Grant application and travelling to referee in Winnipeg and Scarborough, with a stop in Waterloo.

September: 'back to school' and yet more trips

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m starting to write this with 4 days of September left. This month has also flown by. Well, I did fly to Canada, which took a bunch of days. Have been back in Wellington for a week and a bit. Also two weekend trips in September: camping on Matiu/Somes Island and a trip that was meant to be mountaineering but diverted to Taupō due to the weather.

August: more trips

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Lots of trips, not much work. August is OK to be a quiet month. August outdoors activities in NZ need to be winter-ish, i.e. you have to be aware of avalanches (or someone does; we went to ski resorts).

July: some small trips

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another usual non-teaching term month, with trips to Auckland, Turoa, and Wye Creek (Queenstown). New activity: ice climbing (to be used in the mountains). Paper submission and jury duty.

No zombies here: motions to postpone indefinitely are silver bullets

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

‘Postpone indefinitely’ is, as it turns out, a euphemism for ‘kill’.

June: back to normal non-teaching term, writing paper after paper

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A quieter month all around. Short visit to Gold Coast for Australian nationals, and just working on papers.

May: another big month

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Much travel, especially on the West Coast of North America. Really did finish teaching.

April: finally done with Winter term

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Whew! Finished teaching for Spring term. Western Newfoundland; around Montreal; and Brampton. Home repair.

ChatGPT's Hot Takes on Programming Languages and Software Engineering

Sat, 06 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Prompt engineering by Lucas Wojciechowski. Thanks!

User

Give me 10 hot takes on how machine learning will affect programming language / software engineering in the next 10 years

ChatGPT

Sure, here are 10 hot takes on how machine learning will affect programming languages and software engineering in the next 10 years:

Machine learning will become an integral part of software engineering, with developers routinely incorporating ML algorithms and models into their applications.
Programming languages will increasingly support machine learning by providing libraries and tools for ML development, such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.
Developers will need to have a strong understanding of statistics and data analysis in order to effectively incorporate machine learning into their applications.
The demand for data scientists and machine learning engineers will continue to grow, as more companies seek to incorporate machine learning into their products and services.
Natural language processing (NLP) and speech recognition will become more prevalent, leading to the development of new programming languages and tools that support these technologies.
Machine learning will enable the creation of more personalized and adaptive user interfaces, leading to a more seamless and intuitive user experience.
As machine learning becomes more widespread, developers will need to prioritize the ethical implications of their work, such as data privacy, bias, and accountability.
Machine learning will enable the creation of more intelligent and autonomous systems, leading to new challenges in software engineering, such as how to ensure the safety and reliability of these systems.
Developers will increasingly rely on machine learning to automate software testing and debugging, reducing the time and effort required to find and fix bugs.
Finally, machine learning will enable the creation of new types of software applications that were previously not possible, such as self-driving cars, personalized medicine, and smart home automation.

User

Can you make the takes more controversial?

March: lots of good news

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Reasonable success this month, professionally (awarded grant, major revisions on a paper) and for refereeing (selected for Canadian nationals). Lots of work and also weekend trips.

February: COVID, teaching, and a trip to Japan

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

COVID didn’t throw too much of a wrench into things, thankfully. Second month of teaching for Winter 2023, including reading week and a trip to Japan.

January: teaching and extracurriculars

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Back to the classroom (teaching two courses), plus judo tournaments and some skiing. Before that, we hiked Around the Mountain (Taranaki) in New Zealand.

December: start of summer / back to winter soon

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

First conference (SPLASH) in three years (gave two talks) and South Island vacation. Also a bunch of service tasks, e.g. master’s thesis and PhD comprehensive exams. Submitted a paper!

Book review: Can't Get There from Here: New Zealand Passenger Rail Since 1920, by André Brett, maps by Sam van der Weerden

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A good (though detailed) read about the sad history of NZ passenger rail, with advocacy for a better future.

November: winter is coming

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Whirlwind Canada tour, where I refereed judo tournaments, served on PhD committees, met up with a ton of people, and did not get COVID. Lots of service, some research, and ignoring teaching. Failed to hike the Round-the-Mountain Circuit around Taranaki due to rain.

Throwback: Aspect-Oriented Programming

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Aspect-Oriented Programming used to be trendy but never really got traction. Occasionally people talk about things where AOP would have helped.

October: midway through Fall term

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

More research, two multi-day hikes, and a judo tournament. Like a middle of a non-teaching term.

September: more research, some trips

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Normal month in a non-teaching term. Making progress with research. Executing and planning trips, though not far afield (South Island).

August: staying in Canada longer than expected, for good reasons

Thu, 01 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Was going to go to NZ on August 6 but finally went on August 21, after a judo grading. I hope that I’ve finished everything for Spring term teaching now finally, and can get back to research (and seeing more of NZ).

Reflections on judo grades

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I graded for godan (5th dan) on the competitior stream recently. What does it all mean?

July: last month of classes for Spring, plus some trips

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

5 weekends, 5 trips; now in Waterloo to close out the term (and do lots of marking). July less brutal than June.

June: better late than never; so much work.

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

More normal life. Lots of teaching, some paper writing, not much recreation except for an overnight car camping trip.

May: first month of Spring term, so much teaching, focus on judo

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Mostly teaching. I got off the plane from New Zealand, took the taxi back to Waterloo, got up early the next morning, and went to an OAC event at Rattlesnake Point. Back to normal life.

April: between Winter and Spring; more travels

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

End of term. Still avoiding COVID. Getting out of Waterloo while there is no teaching: travels to Yellowknife and New Zealand.

March: first and last full month of teaching in Winter 2022, and some trips

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

People are pretending it’s back to normal, but the sixth wave has started in Quebec.

February: with short escapes to Quebec

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Back to normal? Well, maybe, except that there are still a lot of cases out there.

January: a whole month in K-W

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, I have a place of my own in Waterloo. Back to (virtual) school.

December: back in Canada and not loving it

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last monthly summary from 2021. Homeless during a pandemic, but fortunate enough that it’s just a small inconvenience.

November: last month in New Zealand

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

All things must come to an end. Last month in New Zealand, with one small trip around Timaru and Mount Cook that I’d had my eye on for a while. It was a rewarding last month in New Zealand. Ma te wa.

October: Suppression in Auckland, elimination elsewhere in NZ

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Waiting for the other shoe to drop and hoping that it doesn’t drop before vaccination rates are high enough.

September: Delta's Still Here (mostly in Auckland)

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Outside of Auckland, life is almost normal (for now). Busy writing papers and travelling, as well as contributing to teaching a lab course.

August: Here's Delta

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The 1pm show starring Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Dr. Ashley Bloomfield is back. Really we could do without, but here we are.

July: to the Realm

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s highlights: three trips, including one outside of New Zealand; ten new restaurants; normal non-teaching term month.

June: non-teaching term month 2

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s highlights: SCAM paper submission; less successful tournament result at the Waikato Bays Open (Rotorua); rainy weekend trip to Masterton and Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre; COVID scare in Wellington (got lucky)

May: non-teaching term month 1

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Incremental progress throughout May; as usual, non-teaching terms are much less of a grind.

April: end-of-term slog

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

April has overall been a real grind, with an attempted paper submission and now grading. We had one trip to Christchurch, where our planned objective got rained out, but we still did a bunch of elevation gain (though not much distance, which means steep ascents).

March: finishing the Tongariro Circuit, climbing trip to Pohara, and hiking Wanaka

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Usually by this point we’d be getting close to the end of Winter term (was April 3 in Winter 2020), but we’ve stretched lectures out because of the pandemic (later start, additional scheduled pause, shorter exam period), so we still have 1.5 weeks of class left. I feel like the wheels are starting to fall off at this point, with all sorts of random life things happening to the students in my graduate course. Three trips: back from Tongariro; climbing at Pohara; and hiking around Wanaka.

Book review: The Ethical Algorithm by Kearns and Roth

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Again wandering through a Wellington City Library branch, this time I picked up The Ethical Algorithm by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, from January 2020. It was an easy read for someone with a PhD in Computer Science and a BSc in Math/CS, and I finished it in about two hours. I didn’t pick up that much that was new to me, but I follow developments in this domain as an interested but technically-educated reader.

February: mostly work, plus Tongariro Northern Circuit

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Remote teaching has definitely been grinding along and keeping me busy this past month. The workload has been different for the fourth-year undergraduate course versus the graduate seminar. Aside from teaching and research, there was also returning from the Tuatapere Hump Ridge Track at the very start of the month, the Tongariro Northern Circuit at the end of the month, and the Jumbo Circuit in the middle. No new areas of NZ visited, but did re-visit old locations.

2020 (not travel)

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My non-travel retrospective for 2020: work, life goals, and hobbies.

January: Back to School, and Hump Ridge

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Back to school! Classes started on January 11 and that’s been keeping me busy this month. More about that below.

Book review: Overload by Kelly and Moen

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was wandering through a Wellington City Library branch and picked up Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It by Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen, a book published March 2020. I don’t usually read management books but I am interested in how people work in 2021; work-life balance was cited in Minister Navdeep Bains’s recent resignation, for instance (of course it always is for politicians), and discussed in a Globe and Mail Opinion.

December: Christmas in NZ, 2.5 trips, a Great month

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot more concluding to do in the year in review post that I’ll do next. Let’s focus on December. I’m very fortunate to have been able to see more of the South Island this month, including basically all of the highlights of Fiordland now. (Looking at the Dusky Track which is definitely not type 1 fun.) Also around Dunedin, which doesn’t have high mountains, but does have a few rocks to climb, coastal scenery, and birds.

November: 1.5 trips

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Making the most of my time in New Zealand, and visiting a new-to-me region, as well as re-visiting Fiordland and hiking some mountains. Left town twice this month: once for Auckland plus the ‘Far North’/Bay of Islands, and once for Fiordland, but that trip was half in December.

October: Wellington only

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time since lockdown, we didn’t get out of town all month. On Friday I am going to Auckland and then the Bay of Islands for the week. It feels like I did a lot of work in October but I’m not quite sure what I have to show for it. Certainly a talk. Thought about ongoing projects and working towards a new project (or at least a funding opportunity). Did travel planning for Auckland.

Onward! Essay: Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

From personal experience, I can attest that maintaining compiler infrastructure that builds on top of LLVM is hard over the long term. You try to compile something from a year ago with newest LLVM and find that it no longer works. The upstream LLVM developers make breaking API changes and it is the responsibility of downstream clients to fix their code accordingly.

I can only imagine the joys of keeping up with the JavaScript frontend and npm ecosystems, having mostly avoided that fun. A few months ago, I did get hit with a breaking Hugo update.

In this essay, we make a broader argument: there are opportunities in analyzing changes to software components and either certifying compatibility or detecting breaking changes. Furthermore, many programming languages techniques (formal verification through testing and of course programming language design) can contribute to the important problem of reasoning about upgrades. We survey the role of contracts and discuss how to best determine the exposed API surface of a component.

September: Canterbury and Level 1

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Spring in New Zealand

Once again, spent two-thirds of this month in Wellington. The other 10 days were around Christchurch and Kaikoura. Currently no trips planned until November 27, although perhaps Auckland for not-Nationals judo tournament in early November.

We are moving 700m down the street tomorrow though. The lease on our current place ended and so we looked around for alternatives (although a fun fact is that, like in Ontario, a fixed-term lease automatically becomes periodic upon completion in NZ and needs to be explicitly non-renewed 21 days before the end date). The new place should be nicer in many ways although the view might not be as good.

August: Back from a trip and into Level 2

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In Wellington. Previous trip: Stewart Island; returned to Wellington August 11 (a day before New Zealand went back up to level 2 and Auckland to level 3 following discovery of a new cluster). Next trip: Christchurch, September 11, originally for the South Islands judo championships, now cancelled (oops).

Aside from that, it’s been a fairly quiet month. I hope to at least get all of the Heaphy trip posted and maybe some of the Rakiura trip before going to Christchurch in two weeks. Booked Kepler, Milford, and Routeburn tracks for later this year.

July, including a vacation

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m between trips as I write this. Tomorrow morning we are flying to Invercargill at the end of the South Island and, if weather permits, continuing to Stewart Island/Rakiura. (I’ve learned, however, that we often need to be flexible with these plans, as weather can be from slightly to extremely unfavourable.) Two and a half weeks ago we came back from Christchurch and the West Coast.

I noticed that I promised a writeup for Charleston last month. It’s still to come. The backlog continues to increase.

Level 1 June

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This month started in Charleston where I went climbing with Elliott. As I write this I’m going to the Heaphy Track tomorrow morning. We chose to delay for a day due to weather.

The number of active cases in NZ is now 21 but that is a misleading number; all of these cases are in quarantine “at the border”, i.e. found in returning New Zealanders in managed self-isolation. The number of known active cases in the community is 0 which has been a stable number for a while. As Victoria state in Australia shows, though, cases do seem to be capable of escaping at the border, perhaps through a cigarette lighter. But things are good here for now.

About sabbaticals

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr: Sabbaticals are not an unpaid vacation but rather a chance to focus on longer-term scholarly projects.

Sabbaticals are an awesome feature of the academic job. I feel like they are often misunderstood by the world in general. This description is specifically about how sabbaticals work at the University of Waterloo; many North American universities are similar but not identical.

The normal distribution of work for tenure-track and tenured faculty members at the University of Waterloo is 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. In my department, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 40% teaching means 3 one-semester courses per year: typically one term with 2 courses, one with 1 course, and one with no courses. For regular faculty members, service involves sitting on and chairing university committees (internal service), as well as participating in a research community by reviewing papers and being on committees (external service).

May, moving down the levels

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s astonishing how quickly things have returned to almost-normal in this country. Since May 14 (3 weeks ago already!), we’ve been in Alert Level 2, where most things are open. Physical distancing, capacity controls and mandatory contact tracing remain for now, although there will be another decision next Monday, June 8. The number of known active cases is 1 and the last positive reported case was on May 22.

Haircuts

I had been planning to wait a few more days, but I was walking down the street and noticed a barber open with no line, so I’ve had reasonable hair since May 17. The Onward deadline was with too much hair, but the OOPSLA deadline had the right amount of hair. Very important when spending hours at the computer. Looking through the records, it looks like I feel like I need a haircut after 6 weeks and then wait another 2 weeks to actually get one: Sept 5, Nov 5, Jan 7, Mar 3, May 17. The 10-week interval was excessive.

A Locked-down April

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this on April 30, a day after we were originally scheduled to leave Wellington. But that was no surprise to month-ago me.

Most of April has been under NZ Alert Level 4, although we’ve been in Alert Level 3 for a couple of days now. We’ve been in Wellington since March 20 and not in a car between March 25 and April 29, which is some sort of record for me. Usually I can go a week without a car ride, but 4.5 weeks is something. Also my last haircut was March 3, which is also a record. It looks like The Warehouse has a 2 week shipping time for clippers, so I’ll be going a bit longer still.

The Longest Month

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My notes say that I bought tickets to Athens on March 1. As if things would be normal in two months. The first nine days of March, which I wrote about last time, did seem completely normal. Then we went to Queenstown/Wanaka and Taranaki. As we were at Taranaki, things quickly became not normal. The last 11 days have been a whirlwind, and only in the past few days have I been able to get some research done.

Second month (plus 10 days) in Wellington

Sun, 08 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve now passed the halfway mark for my time in New Zealand, even with an extra 3 days courtesy of Air Canada/Air New Zealand—they rescheduled my return flight from 29 Apr to 2 May and I didn’t notice until I got the seat change email. I’m totally fine with an extra 3 days in New Zealand.

Classes have started again. I guess it’s like September in the northern hemisphere. Days are only 13 hours now, on their way to 10.5 hours when we go back north.

First month in Wellington

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sabbaticals are a large block of unscheduled time. Time always passes. Have I done stuff in my time in Wellington so far?

Professional

I’ve started a number of collaborations with colleagues in Wellington, and am thinking of a survey paper and an essay in particular. I’m excited about contributing to these projects. I hope to have more to report in my February update.

In other news I have a climbing-related submission to the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism (sadly an Elsevier journal) which got a revise-and-resubmit. Progress!

January 2020 Reflections

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bryan Cantrill (of dtrace fame) writes about engineering performance management.

https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1216491216356823040

He suggests the following five questions for engineers to answer twice a year.

What are you most proud of in the last six months?
What did you learn?
Where did you struggle?
What are you anxious about in the coming six months?
What are you excited about in the coming six months?

Most proud of

Having recently removed the se-director email from my Thunderbird, I realized that this role consumed a lot of time and energy. I am most proud of having completed my term and helping students, both in the moment (advising and leading the advising team) and through program changes.

Recommendation Letter for Laurie Hendren

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendation letter for CS-Can Lifetime Achievement Award

I am writing to strongly endorse the nomination of Prof. Laurie Hendren for a posthumous Award for Lifetime Achievement in Computer Science. I’m honoured and also sad to be writing this letter. I’ll get back to it later, but no mention of Laurie would be complete without discussing her infectious laugh, which somewhat offsets the sadness.

Laurie has been an inspiration and role model for me from 1998 through 2018 as an undergraduate student, postdoc, faculty member, and administrator. I hope that in my own career I can continue Laurie’s outstanding legacy to some extent. I’ll mostly describe my perspective on her teaching and research, which were parts of her job that she obviously loved.

Lexicon

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

Pre-batical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
Usage. Her pre-batical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.

Lexicon

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

Pre-battical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
Usage. Her pre-battical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.
Meeting spam. Presentations at meetings where the presenters feel that the participants should know about a topic, but where the participants' time cost exceeds the expected value to them.
Usage. "Gee, I sure didn't get much out of that meeting spam."

Academic Tree circa 2003

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Pull requests accepted!

https://github.com/patricklam/plam.new-webpage

Henry M. Foley (physics)
+--Joseph Frederick Traub (1959, from Columbia) [Columbia] (quantum)
                http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~traub/
   +--Hsiang Tsung Kung (1973, from CMU) [Harvard] (networks)
                http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/
       +--Baudet, Gerard M. (78, from CMU)
       +--Cohn, Robert J. (92, from CMU)*
       +--Fisher, Allan L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Foster, Michael J. (84, from CMU)
       +--Hsu, Feng-hsiung (89, from CMU)
       +--Lam, Monica S. (87, from CMU) [Stanford]
          +--Michael Wolf, (August 1992, from Stanford)
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism and Locality in Nested Loops".
          +--Michael Smith (November 1992, from Stanford) [Harvard]
             Thesis: "Support for Speculative Execution in High-Performance 
                      Processors".
          +--Todd Mowry (March 1994, from Stanford) [CMU]
             Thesis: "Tolerating Latency Through Software-Controlled Data Prefetching".
          +--Martin Rinard (August 1994, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Jade, 
                      a Portable, Implicitly Parallel Programming Language"
             +---Pedro Diniz (May 1997, from UCSB) [ISI]
                 Thesis: "Commutativity Analysis: A New Analysis Framework 
                          for Parallelizing Compilers"
             +---Radu Rugina (January 2002, from UCSB) [Cornell]
          +--Daniel Scales (December 1995, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Efficient Shared Objects for Distributed Address Space Machines"
          +--Saman Amarasinghe (January 1997, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "Parallelizing Compiler Techniques Based on Linear Inequalities"
          +--Jennifer Anderson (March 1997, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Automatic Computation and Data Decomposition 
                      for Multiprocessors"
          +--Robert Wilson (December 1997, from Stanford) [Tensilica]
             Thesis: "Efficient Context-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C Programs"
          +--Jason Nieh (December 1998, from Stanford) [Columbia]
             Thesis: "The Design Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: 
                      A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications"
          +--Shih-wei Liao (August 2000, from Stanford) [Intel Research]
             Thesis: "SUIF Explorer: an Interactive and Interprocedural Parallelizer"
          +--Brian Schmidt (August 2000, from Stanford) [Kealia]
             Thesis: "Supporting Ubiquitous Computing with Stateless Consoles 
                      and Computation Caches"
          +--Patrick Sathyanathan (June 2001, from Stanford) [HP]
             Thesis: "Interprocedural Data Flow Analysis--Alias Analysis"
          +--Amy Lim (September 2001, from Stanford) [Axis]
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism And Data Locality With Affine Partitioning"
       +--Lehman, Philip L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Leiserson, Charles E. (81, from CMU)
       +--Oflazer, Kemal (87, from CMU)
       +--Pieper, Jon (93, from CMU)*
       +--Printz, Harry (91, from CMU)
       +--Robinson, John T. (82, from CMU)
       +--Song, Siang W. (81, from CMU)
       +--Sussman, Alan (91, from CMU)*
       +--Thompson, Clark D. (80, from CMU)
       +--Wu, I-Chen (93) 
   +-- Don Heller (PhD, 1977, from CMU)
+-- Joseph Sucher (PhD, 1957, from Columbia) [Maryland] (theoretical physics)
    Thesis: "Energy levels of the two-electron atom, to order 3 Rydberg."

* - Co-Chairman

Sources:

Concrete Atria are not Atria!

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I was happy to leave my old office, NE43-632, at 200 Technology Square, and move to 32-G730 in the Stata Center. My two complaints about Tech Square were: (1) lack of sunlight; and (2) white noise. I always found the white noise to be annoying, but the lack of sunlight was not always a problem. When I had first arrived at MIT in 2000, we did have natural sunlight in my office.