Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

Graduate Seminar Presentation & Discussion Tips

Updated January 3, 2022 for Winter 2022 offering of SASE. In which I share my opinions about what makes for a good paper presentation for a graduate seminar course, say ECE 750-T5. Logistics We’ll aim for talks of about 30 minutes. During the discussion period (Wednesdays), the presenter will kick off the discussion by summarizing their evaluation, and we’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and how it can inspire your future work (whether academic or industrial).

SE Student Support

I gave a presentation about the Software Engineering undergraduate program at Waterloo. I got a question which I took offline about student support at Waterloo. I think it’s worthwhile to post this here. I am adding some comments from Derek Rayside, current SE Director. Response follows. Thanks for your question about study skills and student support etc. That could be a whole other talk! As came up in the talk, we’re privileged at Waterloo SE to be able to be highly selective with respect to admissions.

Recommendation Letter for Laurie Hendren

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.

Lexicon

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.

Academic Tree circa 2003

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"