OOPSLA has started

Eric | October 22, 2007

Hi all.

OOPSLA has just started yesterday. As usually it’s a lot of fun, to see all those people you only get to see at conferences, plus meeting all those new people that are doing interesting stuff. Jonathan Aldrich from CMU has a really strong and interesting group at the moment, working on typestate, program analysis and structural subtyping embedded in a nominally-typed language (Java). Two of them were attending the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium, which was really a lot of fun. The DS was pretty well organized. It was preceded by a joint dinner yesterday, with presentation around the day today. The students really had without any exceptions really strong and interesting thesis topics, plus we got really great advice (at least IMHO) from the organizers, Elisa Baniassad, Todd Millstein, Martin Rinard and Siobhan Clarke.


The main two questions, students were facing were not surprising:

  1. How do I best validate my research (in particular my language extension / language / type system XYZ)?
  2. How do I know that it’s good enough of a contribution?

If you are a PhD student working in the field I really encourage you submitting to symposium next year. It’s great – you get to know lovely people, get good advice and learn a lot of interesting stuff!