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Showing posts from August, 2016

Arguing for your research

Everything from paper abstracts to grant proposals to fellowship applications, at every level from an undergraduate independent study to a full grant proposal as a faculty member, requires one key task: convincing the reader that your research project is any good. Usually "good" more specifically means: does it solve an important problem? Does it address an important issue? Does it explore important unexplored territory? And, if you haven't done it yet, do you have the right tools to solve/address/explore it? In general, I'm not a huge believer in "formulaic" writing -- the idea that every body of writing ought to be formatted the same way for best results. Especially in creative domains, so much power can be wielded in breaking traditional structures. But for scientific writing, especially project proposals or article submissions, I do find that it really helps to not have to think about  how to structure something and instead just plop down a default out

First semester as a tenure-track professor begins!

In the wake of the busiest Spring and Summer of my life, it appears that I have neglected to inform this blog of a major change to my academic life: I have accepted a position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at North Carolina State University! The semester just started yesterday; I taught my first Ph.D. seminar class on Generative Methods. At NCSU I am joining an active Games research community with colleagues  Dave Roberts ,  Tiffany Barnes , and -- as a result of his move this summer from UCSC --  Arnav Jhala . These folks also have very active research programmes in in learning technology (Barnes), visual narrative (Jhala), and dog cognitive science (Roberts) (yes, you read that right) (dognitive science?). I also have a number of new colleagues doing research in Software Engineering, HCI, and AI topics that overlap with my PL, tool design, and logic interests, so I'm excited about learning more! Once I get my research priorities est