I want to extend a belated welcome to Zixuan (Jason) Yu, a Northeastern University undergraduate student who is working with me on a research coop through December 2025. Jason's project focuses on identifying elements of the Mastodon code base where we might either want to intervene (in order to answer a research question) or where there might be associated privacy considerations.
In 2020 or so, ACM swapped its definitions of reproducibility and replicability to be more in line with the broader social sciences community. I see the reasoning for the swap, but I don't think that the new definition is quite right either. The crux of the issue is that definitions both communities are using are a shorthand that doesn't map appropriately across communities.
In August 2022, after almost two years as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science, I resigned from my position at the University of Vermont. This was not my preferred path, but something I felt I had to do in light of some family stressors and an increasingly untenable mismatch in values between me and my institution. Thus I joined my Millennial brethren in the Great Resignation.
Last week, Kaleigh Clary presented her work, Stick it to the Man: Correcting for Non-Cooperative Behavior of Subjects in Experiments on Social Networks at USENIX Security. One of the things I really like about this work is the focus on analysis and implications of non-cooporative actors in network experiments from a PL/systems perspective.
Here in the MaPLE lab, we treat the techniques students cultivate in their programming systems classes as general methods for answering a broad range of research questions that arise in and around software when it is used in nontraditional ways. As a result, students without formal training in the techniques we use often ask: "What is PL?," whereas those with training often ask: "How is what you do PL?"
