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February 24, 2006

How to Write a Proposal

I've been asked repeatedly by students and others for advice on writing a proposal document. As with all documents, I believe that the best way to go about this is to concentrate on two things: the audience and the goal of the document. In general, a proposal is written to someone who has the ability to allow you to do something (i.e. money, resources, supervision) and your goal is to convince them to enable or allow you to do it. With that in mind, we can come up with a few guidelines.

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June 10, 2004

The range of CS theories.

Dennis Hamilton commented on my HCI and CS Progress post a while back and makes a particularly relevant point:
I'd say that one barrier to progress is the presumption that the proper theoretical framework for software engineering is to be found in formal mathematics.
The question thus arises: What would be the range of CS theory to actually support software development?

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June 08, 2004

Computer Science as a Science: What should it look like?

To follow up my own previous essay about HCI progress, I want to talk about CS as a science. If we want to understand why Computer Science is failing as a science (at least from the point of view of most software developers or software engineers), it is important to understand what a science looks like and what a scientific theory looks like.

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May 05, 2004

HCI and CS Progress

Whittaker, S., Terveen, L., and Nardi, B. (2000) Let's stop pushing the envelope and start addressing it: a reference task agenda for HCI Human Computer Interaction, 15, 75-106.

I've felt for a long time now that there's something deeply wrong with Computer Science as a research field. It seems that overall, and definitely in some sub-disciplines, there is very little sense of real progress. While this paper concentrates almost entirely on HCI as a research area, it would seem to have a great deal of good insight to communicate on this perception and some of its causes.

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April 02, 2004

How to Write a Project Report

Now and again, my students ask me what they should put in their project reports. Since I teach two courses with substantial projects (EECE 375/474 and EECE 478), this comes up a lot. I've got a reasonably stock answer, so it makes sense to write it down here and then just point to it when needed. If you're interested, keep on reading.

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