The blogger doth protest too much, methinks. We learn all about his academic credentials almost as soon as the blog post begins, but don't hear anything about his real-world accomplishments beyond attending great schools.
What does everyone think of the blogger's academics page?
Disclaimer: I don't know the blogger, and as far as I know I don't know any of his professional colleagues or classmates from any era. I'm not competent to judge accomplishments in the domain of computer science, but I try to pick up nuances from English writing, just as does any other reader of English.
They make you draw it out of them. I have found at least three types of people that respond in this manner:
1 - The person that was raised elite since birth and really doesn't care at all what you think about him. So him dragging it out is him avoiding the question and hoping you'll learn not to pry.
2 - The person that is tired of being identified with this standard questioning. So him dragging it out is somewhere in the middle. He can use it to his advantage when needed but for the most part doesn't want to be identified in this way.
the motivation for people i know to do that is less disingenuous ...
4 - if you say that you went to Harvard (or another well-known university), lots of people automatically cringe and think "ugh this guy must be a snob!", so if you're really not a snob, then the reason for avoiding specifics is so that people don't pre-judge upon first impressions.
the responses to my article sort of exemplifies this phenomenon. lots of readers didn't like how i 'name-dropped' where i attended school ... i was mentioning where i went to school because it's relevant for the point i'm making in my article, not merely to show off or brag.
oftentimes i don't tell people where i went to school because i don't want to automatically be viewed as a snob on first impressions.
2009 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for HAMPI: A Solver for String Constraints, an ISSTA 2009 paper with Kiezun (lead author), Ganesh, Hooimeijer, and Ernst
The rest is mediocre-impressive. Nothing to laugh at, but nothing to distinguish him from the other MIT/Stanford students either. I think he has a good point.
Thanks, I found it already but I can see you're one of the co-authors so I appreciate your effort.
It's going to be some time before I can get to using it but like I said this pretty much is exactly what a currently-stalled project has been looking for.
If I make a real use of this library I'll pass along a proper description so you can see what use it's getting.
As it'll be awhile I'll give you a minimal summary now (in as much detail as I can, which isn't that much sorry).
The overall point is to take input (sequence of words), and then generate further input that is "related" but not identical (think: clearly a variation on the theme, but not rote repetition). The mechanism is that there's a set of grammars specifying overlapping formal languages; input is broken into words and each word is parsed in each grammar that contains that word; some inference and calculation is done to generate a sort-of style profile and then that profile is used together with the underlying grammars to drive generation of new output.
The quality of the output has been underwhelming, mainly b/c doing exact parsing seems to leave a nasty trade-off between the "interestingness" of the grammars in the set and nontriviality of the "style profile":
- having "interesting" grammars means the style profile is too constrained (so the generated output too closely resembles the input)
- having "larger" grammars means the style profile is richer but the output is weak (doesn't adequately resemble the input to a human observer)
Where a library like hampi fits into this is (hopefully) the ability to efficiently loosen-up the parsing in a nicely-constrained way; using some metadata attached to the grammars it ought to be possible to intelligently knock-out part of a word and ask hampi to find a replacement string that makes the word parse within a particular language.
Essentially intentional misunderstanding of input => novel synthesis.
Its an interesting topic. Not sure the blog post really proved his point, but a bit of "arrogance in the large" (on the internet), doesn't bug me. I don't expect to be able to decide if his stated credentials mean anything; just that he is stating they do and establishes how he feels relative to the other statement he's making.
I can be arrogant at times, both in public posts and with people that know me well. For the public assertions, I don't expect people to buy my assertions. Simply asserting them may set a tone I find, at the moment, to be useful. The reader can decide for themselves how to take it.
He's on the fast path to a research job, buried in the bowels of some company, working on middle ware. Either that or he'll simply get a teaching job at one of the schools he decries in his post.
Feel free to downvote, but at least bother to type some reasoning. The number of tier-1 PhD grads that end up in teaching posts at state schools is pretty tremendous.
And as anyone who reads this site knows, good schooling != life/work experience.
Unless Mr. Guo changes his attitude a bit, he's unlikely to find success outside of academia or pure research departments of large companies.
I don't believe you read the article. He's edited it now, but the ending was basically advice that "if you didn't go to X, don't try to compete, you'll only be met with disappointment". That's (was before the edit) calling Y crap pretty much.
I skimmed it - forgive me that I didn't want to read the whole thing. Given that I feel you have consistently misinterpreted his words in the main article in question, I doubt I would agree with your current interpretation if I could check it against his original words.
What does everyone think of the blogger's academics page?
http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/academic.htm
Disclaimer: I don't know the blogger, and as far as I know I don't know any of his professional colleagues or classmates from any era. I'm not competent to judge accomplishments in the domain of computer science, but I try to pick up nuances from English writing, just as does any other reader of English.