About Tim Menzies

Accepted to ICSE'12: goldfish panel

Software Development Analytics. Organized with Thomas Zimmermann, Microsoft.

Technical briefing, accepted to ICSE'12

Understanding Machine Learning for SE

Newly appointed, associate editor

IEEE Transactions Software Engineering

Paper accepted to ICSE'12 research track

MORPH: Balancing Privacy and Utility. With Fayola Peters.

Ranked top 10, in SE, last 5 years

Out of 50,000+ researchers. Ranked by g-index.

Invited to program committee

ESEM'12 (Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement)

Top cited WVU author

Top 1% of 1819 WVU authors. Source: http://goo.gl/mzaFu. H-index...

Most cited author in IEEE TSE (since 2007)

My Jan'07 IEEE TSE paper Data Mining Static Code Attributes to Learn Defect Predictors with PSU grad students (Jeremy Greenwald and Art Frank) is the highest referenced TSE article for 2007-2011. TSE is a top journal in SE where articles get 2-17 references (25th-75th percentile, since 2005). Our article has 104 references while the 5 nearest have 83, 74 72, 64 and 61. So this article really stands out! For the data behind this shameless (and quite proud) boast, see http://goo.gl/Ou0Yd.

ICSE'12 accepts my technical briefing

Understanding Machine Learning for Empirical Software Engineering.

S.P.A.C.E. exploration for SE

Slides from talk in London (CREST Open Workshop, Oct 21-22). View on line: http://goo.gl/UKSS7. Download slides: http://goo.gl/PsKKE. Watch video: part 1 and part 2.

Three papers in IEEE TSE in 2011

All hail my co-authors: Jamie Andrews, Ayse Bener, Jack Keung*2, and Ekrem Kocag�neli*2.

Journal paper accepted to IEEE TSE

On the Value of Ensemble Effort Estimation

Talk at ESEM'11

How to find relevant data for effort estimation

Paper accepted to ESE journal

Kernel Methods for Software Effort Estimation

Paper accepted to Malets'11

The Inductive Software Engineering Manifesto

Talk at Microsoft Research, July28

Empirical SE, version 2.0

At Microsoft, Redmond, for 1 month

Data mining inside their firewalls. Wow.

Paper accepted to ASE'11

15% acceptance rate. Local vs Global Models for Effort Estimation and Defect Prediction

Invitation to speak in London

From Mark Harman. Oct 2011. Crest Open Workshop.

In 40,000+ papers since 2006

My papers are cited #37-th and #114-th.

105 authors from 18 countries

PROMISE'11 submissions : Australia, HongKong, Italy, Jordan, UnitedArabEmirates, VietNam, India (2), UnitedKingdom (2), Germany (3), Norway (3), Japan (4), Malaysia (4), NewZealand (4), Spain (4), Turkey (6), China (10), Brazil (13), Canada (13), UnitedStates (30).

5th most cited paper

ESE journal, 2009-2010 (Me, with Turhan+ Benar+ DiStefano)

Journal paper accepted

Expert Sys. with App.: Learning Patterns of University Student Retention, Ashutosh Nandeshwara, Tim Menzies, Adam Nelson

Journal paper accepted

IJSEKE: "Exploring the Effort of General Software Project Activities with Data Mining"

WVU college award

Outstanding researcher (2010)

My Talk at Microsoft Research

Video: Empirical SE, v2.0

Journal paper accepted

IEEE Trans. on SE. "Exploiting the Essential Assumptions of Analogy-based Effort Estimation"

Subject evaluations

Good reviews for 2010 data mining class.

CV updated for 2010

new: $1M in grants; 9 journal + 7 conference papers.

ICSE'11 acceptance

Empircal SE, v2.0: A 90 minute briefing (with Forrest Shull).

New grant: $200K, Qatar NRF

International Center of Excellence in SE

Invitation to PC

ESEM'11

New book chapter

Chpt1 of "Making Software". With Forrest Shull.

Invitation to PC

FSE 2011 "New Ideas" track.

Dec'10 issue of ASE journal

Has three papers by me. Tee hee.

Special issue, ESE journal

Repeatablity & Effort Estimation, editors= me + Martin Shepperd

Special issue, ASE journal

Learning to organize testing, editors= me + Ayse Benar

Co-PC charis ASE 2012:

Me, and Motoshi Saeki

FSE 2010 accepts two papers

In the Future of SE workshop: "Software is Data Too" with Andrian Marcus; "On the Shoulders of Giants" with Earl Barr, Christian Bird, Eric Hyatt, and Gregorio Robles.

TV interview

WBOY-TV, Aug 9,2010: Scientists are developing better filters to make digital data useful.

New NSF Award

$500K, with Andrian Marcus, at Wayne State University Better...

The PROMISE'10 conference accepts two papers.

On the Value of Learning From Defect Dense Components for Software Defect Prediction by Hongyu Zhang, Adam Nelson, and Tim Menzies Case-Based Reasoning vs Parametric Models for Software Quality Optimization by Adam Brady and Tim Menzies.

Automated Software Engineering journal accepts two papers

Stable Rankings for Different Effort Models by Tim Menzies, Omid Jalali, Jairus Hihn, Dan Baker, and Karen Lum Defect prediction from static code features: current results, limitations, new approaches but Tim Menzies, Zach Milton, Burak Turhan, Bojan Cukic Yue Jiang, and Ayse Bener

Software Practice & Experience journal accepts paper

Sharing Experiments Using Open Source Software Adam Nelson, Tim Menzies, Gregory Gay

IST Journal accepts paper

Practical Considerations in Deploying Statistical Methods for Defect Prediction: A Case Study within the Turkish Telecommunications Industry Ayse Tosun, Ayse Bener, Burak Turhan, Tim Menzies

Webcast: Wayne State talk

Finding local lessons in SE

Paper accepted to IEEE TSE

Genetic Algorithms for Randomized Unit Testing

Wet fluffies vs warm fluffies

My cat thinks it can create its own reality, just by growling at it. We've...

New draft paper

Exploiting the Essential Assumptions of Analogy-based Effort Estimation

My body, the car

Godley And Creme warned us: our bodies are like motor cars that wear...

Emacs SVN mode = good

I've been using the svn mode in emacs. At first, I thought it had a bug: it made me...

Assaulted, by batteries

Decided to buy shares in lithium. Batteries are the future. Did a head count. My house in crawling in batteries: Lounge Room Video remote (2*AAA) DVD player remote (2*AAA) Camera (4 * AA) WII remotes (2*2*AA) Bedrooms: Alarm clocks (2*AAA) Study Desk clock (1*AA) Remote mouse (1*AAA) Other Camera Air-Con remotes (3*2*AAA) Fire Alarms (4*wide 6V) And I'm sure I've missed some. And when the lithium runs out, what next: Helium? Everyone driving round in cars with squeaky voices like Mickey Mouse? And then what? Hydrogen cells? Could be a BAAAD idea. Oh, the humanity.

Bad case of acute syllabi

So I can't read a calendar. I thought this week was last week. Or, should...

Raining, inside the house

I've never had such a house. It keeps raining, inside! Two years ago, a radiator froze over and ruptured, sending gallons of water down into the bedroom roof. Took us weeks to get dry. We are pulling up the kitchen roof this year- to fix a pesky leak from the plumbing under the guest bathroom. And last night, after 2 weeks of snow, the drains froze and burst and now we have drip-drip-drip inside the front door. Hell, I've seen The Last Wave, I know what happens next. Everyone: time to buy scuba gear!

Give us this day, our daily hack

I am revealing in a morning hack. Take all that screwing around time. Do it for 1 hour first thing in the morning. Maybe even get some cool stuff done. But burn it off so the rest of the day can be spent happily in administrivium.

And the snow comes down

Weeks of snow. Wonderful.

21-century: looking good

I love the modern world. Last night I had insomnia, so in one hour I added to a website I'm working on: Google search Google analytics code highlighting and a comment system. All this was done using 3rd party free tools and less than 40 lines of javascript. (Note: search is broken till the Google spiders pass my way.)

The web is closer than my hard drive

When I lose a file, I used to search for it using OS/X's "searchlight" tool. However, I copied most of my files to an on-line publicly readable web-based version control system. So an alternative to searching for it in my 500GB hard drive is to ask Google to search for it amongst it's petabytes of data. And the winner? Google search,hands down. This means that the web is now a faster place to explore than my local computer.

Scripting 'r us

I've realized something. What I like doing is scripting. Scripting is what is what blew my mind in Beach Street Bondi in 1986 when I sat all day in my little room, hacking on my Taiwan AT clone. And all I've ever done since is tried to find some business model where I can fund my scripting addiction.

Building an IDE

I'm building an IDE for a language I like and it is so NOT what I thought it would be. Occasionally I run to the cupboard to grab a coat , throw open the door, and find a whole vast room in there full of details to be retired. Today I realized that I was going to spend a LOT of time importing all my old one-line functions into this IDE framework .

Busy!

November and December was extraordinarily busy. I mean...

New Journal article

Explanation vs Performance in Data Mining: A Case Study with Predicting Runaway Projects

Slides of my Tsinghua University talk

Finding local lessons in software engineering

Slides from my ASE'09 talk

Understaning the Value of Software Engineering Technologies Understanding the Value of Software Engineering Technologies View more documents from timmenzies.

Invited to join editorial board

Automated Software Engineering Journal

New talk: Data Mining and SE

Here are the slides from my recent talk at UtDallas. Data Mining: The Missing Link in Empirical SEView more documents from timmenzies.

Invited to Tsinghua University, Beijing

Dr Hongyu Zhang, (School of Software, Tsinghua University) has kindly invited me to China to give a talk at his university. Download the poster for the talk.

Automated SE Journal accepts paper

Finding Robust Solutions in Requirements Models Tim Menzies with...

Friendship Hill

Albert Gallatin build a mansion near Morgantown, WV. Who was Albert?...

Palace of Gold

Can you believe it? There is a massive massive massive Hare Krishna palace near Moundsville, WV. The Internet map directions are somewhat incorrect, towards the end: 2/10's of a mile past Limestone General Store turn on to Limestone Hill Palace Road. Stay on the paved road with the double yellow center line. Go 3.7 miles to the Palace of Gold. View Larger Map The Palace of Gold is yet another Morgantown Secret.

Moundsville Prison

This one might want to remain a secret. But, for the strong of heart, a visit to the infamous Moundsville Prison is a very intense experience. This place had hangings, riots, etc,etc. It was shut down after the courts ruled in inhumane. One hour of touring inside and you understand why. On the way back, just to neutralize the horror of the jail, go see the

Secret Morgantown

There are all these pretty places around Morgantown that are drop-dead gorgeous- but its taken me a decade to find them. Here is list of amazing afternoon/ day trips around Morgantown: Morgan Run Road: beautiful lake-side park. Kentuck Knob amazing architecture and sculptures. Moundsville Prison : not for the faint hearted. Palace of Gold : can anyone say "Almost Heaven"? Friendship Hill : a 200 year-old mansion, 20 minutes from M'town.

Kentuck Knob

Want some Frank Lloyd Wright architecture? Kentuck Knob has drop-dead brilliant architecture and amazing guided tours. Not as spectacular as Falling Water, but nowhere near as crowded. Also recommended is the walk back from the house down the hill to the car park, via "The Meadow" (contains 400 2-d red tin solders, a 12' high chunk of the Berlin Wall, and other cool++ stuff). View Larger Map Kentuck Knob is yet another Morgantown Secret.

Morgan Run Road

North end of Cheat Lake is a manicured lake front with easy walkways between lake and forest. Fantastic at sunset. Really nice drive down there. View Larger Map Morgan Run Road is yet another Morgantown Secret.

I used to drink optimistically...

Now I drink misty optically. Here's the Friday night drinks crowd. We gather to reassure each other that, yes indeed, we are marvelous and wonderful. And, gosh darn it, we are too!

Should I cheer this?

Some Australian accused me of being a dirty old man posting these pictures of cheerleaders to my FLICKR account. I was about to protest that this was decent, wholesome, all American girls. Then, for a second, my cultural conditioning slipped and I looked again at these writhing tanned trimmed limbs over mini-skirts short enough to show their breakfast. All to the tune of some guy blowing his horn. Now I'm confused...

PROMISE'10 web site

Now live.

No news is good news?

I used to blog a lot here. Now, I am spread out over five sites: The PROMISE'10 web site; Data mining via scripting; Agent-oriented programming; Awk programming; The WVU CBR project; the WVU AI lab. Give me this day my daily web site .....

Data mining toolkit

A WVU scripting environment for data mining experiments.

Agent-oriented SE at WVU.

New web site on agent-based programming.

Awk.info

New web site on all things awk.

Case-based software engineering

CBR at WVU.

Talk at ICSM'09

Sonia Haiduc presented our ICSM'09 paper.

Modeling Intelligence Lab

We have a new site for CSEE AI research.

WVU Seminar

Mathew Valenti kindly asked me to speak at the WVU CSEE graduate seminar series (Oct 5). I'll post the slides here when I get them done.

Invited Talk, UT Dallas

Eric Wong kindly invited me to speak at UT Dallas CS colloquium (Oct 23). I'll post the slides here when I get them done.

Program committees

I've been asked to serve on the PCs of ESEM'10, MSR'10 and INFOS'10.

Paper accepted to ASE 2009

Understanding the Value of Software Engineering Technologies

Paper accepted to ASE 2009

Assessing the Relative Merits of Agile vs Traditional Software Development

Paper accepted to ISSRE 2009

Cost Curve Evaluation of Fault Prediction Models

Yue Jiang receives Ph.D.

Incremental Development and Cost-based Evaluation of Software Fault Prediction Models

Invited to program committee

Mining Software Repositories, 2010.

Dieting = tripping?

Sshhh... don't tell your minister but dieting is a buzz. I'm on day 8 of...

Dieting, again

Welcome (again) to day three of South Beach Diet, phase one. For the next 11...

Shakespeare hates your emo poems

So says Gregory Gay, voice of the nation.

Paper accepted to ICSM'09

On the use of Relevance Feedback in IR-based Concept Location

Latest conference papers

MALETS'11, ESEM'11, ASE'11.

Resaerch students:

Current: 3*phd + 2*masters. Completed: 4*phd + 19*masters; (only counted if I am commitee chair).

Publications

41 journal publications, 164 others including 90 at major international conferences.

Grants, total

Nasa:$2,000K; National archives:$1,400K; Nsf:$860K; Dod.sttr:$300K; Qatar NRF:$200K; Wvu forensics:$110K; TOTAL:$4,840K

The Zen of Gardening

Today we took all the bricks out of the garden path, weeded, laid some sheeting (death to weeds), then put the bricks back. Total time = 3 hours. Net movement of bricks = zero. But we felt better when we were done. One strange thing. Initially, we had N bricks on the path. Then, after much pulling and pushing, we had relaid N-6 bricks. The leftover six bricks now mock our revised geometry.

Grants, current(2010)

Nsf: $500K + $369K; Qatar NRF: $200K; Dod.sttr(phase2): $260K; Wvu forensics: $35K.

New grant

STTR (phase 2) from DoD, with Grammatech. Starts Sept'09. Details to follow.

Paper accepted to PROMISE 2009

How to Share Experiments

Paper accepted to ICSP 2009

On the Relative Merits of Software Reuse

Paper accepted to PROMISE 2009

Can we build software better and faster and cheaper?

Paper accepted to the SPIP journal

Accurate estimates without local data?

Student evals: cs310(Programming languages)

Responses from 35 students instructor's clarity = 4.31 / 5; teaching effectiveness = 4.11 / 5; overall rating = 4.11 / 5. No written comments.

Student evals, cs791(search-based SE)

Comments from 3 students. instructor's clarity = 4.67 / 5; teaching effectiveness = 4.67 / 5; overall rating = 4.67 / 5. No written comments.

Student evals: cs472(AI)

Comments from 21 students. instructor's clarity = 4.62 /...

Student evals: cs572(advanced AI)

Comments from 6 students: instructor's clarity= 4.17 / 5;...

Kindles rock

I used to be the guy who read. I read everything, all the time. Lately, last few years, not so much. Sooooo busy on tenure track technical stuff. But that has changed, thanks to my Kindle. I bought it for Helen, did a test configure, glanced at my first download, read some, read some more... Two hours later I thought "Helen is NOT getting this as a gift". So I did the only honorable thing. Now Helen and I take our two Kindles (a.k.a. the twindles) everywhere.

The semester is over... finally!

This has been a HUGE semester. For years I've had the NASA buffer going and I...

A little Awk goes a long way

You may have been wondering why this site has been so static of recent...

Maria and Val: R.I.P.

I don't even know how to write this one. Last month I learned that two of...

Conference overdose

Question: What does I C S E, I C P C, I C S P, and P R O M I S E spell? Answer:...

Worst use of technology, ever.

The new “Ocarina” app for the iPhone allows you to play a musical instrument by using the touch screen to tap out notes and the microphone to measure breath like a pseudo-wind instrument. Since I am the resident experimenter of all things new (see my recent encounter with Mo’s Bacon Bar) I decided to stage a public performance of the Ocarina:

I will never understand teenage girls

When I was a teenage boy, the biggest mystery in my life was teenage girls. I thought I'd gotten over that but last night I went and saw Twilight. Here, the biggest thrill in a girl's life is to be pursued by the ultimate hunter killer; then caught; then held close (but not too close) by this guy who might never, ever, go away. And I thought dimensionality synthesis in hyper-geometrical space was complicated.

From jails to palaces of gold

You could not make this up. Saturday we toured hell and saw heaven. Hell...

Score: turkey=0, humans=1

Great Thanksgiving. Low key. Neighbors (Max and Lucy) came around and we boozed and stuffed ourselves all day. Everything was fun- even watching a dog show where the dogs looked like toupees.

"The class I've been waiting for."

I spent an hour reviewing my graduate data mining class with the...

Paper accepted to ESE Journal

Cross-Company vs Within-Company Data for Defect Prediction

Paper accepted to ICSE'09

How to avoid drastic process change. 12% acceptance rate.

Managing Uncertainty in Value-Based SE

A presentation to the COCOMO forum 2008. October 28. 2008. Managing Uncertainty in Value-based SEView SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Why Turing Machines?

Listen to the audio from my talk from the NSF Codeworks workshop, April 5 2008. This written material from this talk is also on-line.

Talk at Google: Learning Defect Predictors from Static Code Attributes; Oct 29 '08

Download slides (PDF) For six years, I have worked on learning quality...

Parametric Analysis of a Hover Test Vehicle Using Advanced Test Generation and Data Analysis

Paper accepted to AIAA'09, 5-8 Jan'09, Orlando, Florida

Practical Considerations in Deploying AI: A Case Study within the Turkish Telecommunications Industry

New paper with Ayse Tosun, Burak Turhan, Ayse Bener

On the Relative Value of Cross-Company and Within-Company Data for Defect Prediction

New paper with Burak Turhan, Ayse Bener, and Justin Distefano

Over-production?

By mid-October I will have: 4 ESE journal submissions; 3 TSE journal submissions; 1 SPIP journal submission; 1 IJTAI journal submission; 1 ICSE paper submission Now, submissions does not mean acceptances and pride comes before a fall and I've been doing real bad lately with TSE. On the other hand, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Finding the walls of the fish bowl

Once upon a time, a few people knew where to park their cash so...

The world did not end

Last Tuesday was end of financial year. The world was going to end unless I got some reports written. Heads up- in case you didn't notice- it didn't. So you know how I spend Tuesday.

Accurate Estimation Without Calibration?

New paper with Barry Boehm, Steve Williams, Oussama Elrawas, Daniel Baker, Jairus Hihn, Karen Lum, and Ray Madachy

Si, I am a dog

This dog, sleeping in the plaza at L'Aquila, seems to me to be...

Software Ecologies

Something has changed in software. The Platonist and formalists are retreating (or retiring) and the ardent model-based reasoning people are singing another tune.

L'Aquila: a mountain Italian town

L'Aquila, 2 hours east of Rome, is not a popular tourist location. It is a small bustling, living town. We work here, not entertain Americans. This is a typical Italian town of tiny streets and even tinier cars. The town has the ritual brassy nudes, cavorting in the water. Even the toilets are stylish. Of course, we have many Y.A.A.O.T.C. (yet another angel on the ceiling). And what Italian mountain town is complete without a spooky hulking medieval fort?

Better than the real thing

I can't help noticing that this conference looks better on the video screen than in real life. Also (begin geek joke) this is a bounded model checker (only two copied of a recursive structure).

Real-Time Optimization of Requirements Models

New paper with Gregory Gay, Omid Jalali, Martin Feather, James Kiper

Automatic Estimation Techniques are Useful?

New paper with Omid Jalali, Jairus Hihn, Dan Baker, and Karen Lum

How to Avoid Drastic Software Process Change (using Stochastic Stability)

New paper with Steve Williams, Barry Boehm, Jairus Hihn, Oussama El-Rawas

Incremental Development of Software Quality Prediction Models

New paper with Yue Jiang and Bojan Cukic

Using a Genetic Algorithm to Control Randomized Unit Testing

New paper, with James Andres and Felix Li

Best WV long weekend trip?

I was wondering, before the days grow shorter and cooler, what would be the...

Countdown to Prof. Timm

Welcome to the 3rd year tenure track grind. The next three months are...

Addicted to power

On this road trip we carry numerous rechargeable devices- none of which...

New Mexico beats Utah?

Utah rocks, but New Mexico does more. In 2005, we went to Utah. Everyday, we...

New Mexico & monsoons?

Welcome to New Mexico. Desert sands. Atomic wastes. Searing heat. Drizzling rain. Can I have that last one again? Ever heard of the New Mexico monsoon season? I hadn't. But every afternoon here the clouds gather and the rain falls.

A nuke a day...

Welcome to the Atomic Museum, Albuquerque. In the original version of this Nagasaki bomb, Helen stood nervously at its side. Then she demanded that the photo be deleted saying "I don't want to be seen anywhere near this thing". What was scary was how small were these nukes. The Hiroshima bomb was tiny.

Temperance says "happy birthday"

For my birthday, all my dreams came true. Bones sent me a letter! Hi TIm, Thinking of you! XXOO, Temperance

Paper accepted to ISSRE'08

Cost Curve Evaluation of Fault Prediction Models

Paper accepted to ASE'08

Using Simulation to Investigate Requirements Prioritization Strategies

Welcome to the 1980s

I'm so up to the minute. In the last week I got a rule-covering algorithm going (PRISM, 1987) and an iterative dichomization tree learner (ID3, 1982). Great breakthroughs in modern science? I don't think so. Nevertheless, I am now the father of a 10-fold tree learner and I couldn't be prouder.

Relaxing with the murderers

Kathy Recihs' books are like my old kindergarten blanket. Familiar and very comforting when you curl up together. The formula is simple: Everywhere you go, find human bones. Then take any friend or relative and have them drawn into the lethal web of the bad guys. Climax when our heroine arrives at some crucial moment when everyone's lives are on the line. At this point, she does something plucky but usually not very effective. End with crappy detective acknowledging that our heroine is needed to rid the city of crime. Repeat in the next book. Are we relaxed yet?

Summer rain

It rained all weekend. Gently falling, huge gobs of heat relief. Like walking around inside a huge slow shower. Very relaxing. I've been fighting with LISP and data mining and when nothing was going right and my recursive tree builder was going crazy, I'd stare blankly out the window listening to a steady patter plop plop plop. Drops of water, not so much falling as drifting down.

Californication overdose

Gawd bless the 21st century. Don't watch any series week by week. I...

More forensic porn

Ok, Temperance Brennan and Bones is all well and good but she ain't the...

Not reusable till reused

Been having much fun coding a data mining toolkit in LISP. Congratulating...

I love Temperance Brennan

In the last 15 days. I've eaten 3 seasons of "BONES". 58 episodes. Serious corpse porn: blood, gore, maggots, bodies melted to mush. Yummy. My wife is in love with Hodgins. I am fond of Angela and would die for a date with Temperance. But we both agree that (a)Zach's fate was so sad; and (b)we need to curse the writer strike for cutting short the season three arc. Now we wait wait wait wait for season four.

Dieting blues

Welcome back to South Beach, phase 1. Two weeks of no booze, no bread, and...

Why I Love Lisp

I've been having doubts about my choice of LISP for this data mining toolkit I am writing for the fall class. Then, yesterday, I was writing the generic 10-way cross-way loop. And I realized that (a) there was a general pattern to that processing; and that (b) I could code it up as 20 lines of LISP, plus some funcall to particular functions passed in as arguments. So, while other languages support this or that, LISP supports all things. IJAM (it's just another macro). Tee hee. (defmacro square (x) (let ((x1 (gensym))) `(let ((,x1 ,x)) (* ,x1 ,x1))))

A drive beneath me

Sunday, I was lost. Driving through empty streets in download Portland...

Playing with the rocket scientists

Another day, another day of data mining and software process theory at JPL. Spent 3 hours today sitting under sun umbrellas at JPL geeking out. Pairwise testing rules. Data flows like wine. And data mining is cool. Geek heaven.

The land that Internet forgot

L.A.: a primitive and savage land where the locals disfigure themselves in order to appease the gods (of fashion). Where the car is king and all travel is at 80 m.p.h. Including the Internet. My hotel has the wireless less connection from hell. Or, should I type, th e wir ele ss cooooooooonnnnn ee cti onn fro m hellll.

Greatest name of a function

I love LISP. Here's a function whose name is the formulae it implements. (defun b^2/b+r (w before) (let ((best (wme-besth w)) (rest (wme-resth w)) out) (labels ((rank (b r) (/ (* b b) (+ b r))) (result (k v) (cons (float (rank v (gethash k rest 0))) k))) (sufficient w) (dolist (eg (wme-best w)) (inc eg best before)) (maphash #'(lambda (k v) (push (result k v) out)) best) (sort out #'> :key #'car)))) Tee hee.

Are you PC?

I'm at the ASE program committee meeting. 40 people flying themselves in from around the world- how much would this cost if it was funded? Such collegiality. It makes me want to sing (to the tune of WHAM's classic "wake me up before you go-go"): Write me up before you go go, Cause I think your paper's so so, Fix this up to show that you know, Anything 'bout your field.

If clouds, then Pacific NW

Helen woke up, gazed out the hotel window at the low gray rainy clouds that...

In the beginning...

In the beginning the project was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the accountant. And the spirit of coffee moved upon the pen of the academic and he wrote stuff. And NSF said "let there be funding" and, lo, there were green sheets. And the accountants saw the green sheets, that it was good. And the accountants divided the money into faculty salary and student salary. And the promotions committee saw the green sheets, that it was good.

Can Data Transformation Help in the Detection of Fault-prone Modules?

DEFECTS 2008: Data preprocessing (transformation) plays an important...

A memorable day

Up at sparrow's fart doing spreadsheets. B'fast at Cooper's Rock.Home for much hacking.Dinner at Asian Garden with Eddy and Crystal. Home (again) for dessert and much playing of the Wii.

Wii, the people

And, of an evening, the humble village folks gather round the big-screen flat panel T.V. to bash the crap out of golf balls, bowling pins, and androgynous boxing partners. (More pics...)

Photos from Leipzig

Welcome to post-soviet East Germany

Photos from PROMISE 2008

An ICSE'08 conference.

Let's write a textbook

24 people writing one textbook? Why not? Crowd sourcing rules! I've...

Summer resolutions

Gym, swimming, eating healthy, weight loss, not work obsessed, kinder to small children and animals, generous to charities, more time on the house and garden, get out of bed earlier, get more sleep, .... (Memo: erase this page in 2 months time.)

Leipzig architecture

Just back from Leipzig, which used to be in East Germany. The architecture was... informative: Pre-soviet: ornate, festive. Soviet era: clean, crisp, sterile, no decadent Western decoration. Post-soviet: proud buildings glad to be buildings. The centerpiece of our conference center was a five stories of mezzanines around a glass elevator shaft with glass elevator cabs. The elevator motors, top of the shaft, where left exposed and panted yellow just to draw your attention to them.

Indiana Jones, sucks

How can you screw up an Indiana Jones movie? Inject adrenaline into the veins of the audience, hang them out over the edge, give them a crescendo at the end, etc etc. For shame Mr Spielberg. And what a waste of a perfectly good Cate Blanchet.

Begin 2 days of denial and anger

TSE just rejected a journal paper submission. And so it begins. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Oh, then death. God I hate that cycle.

NSF accepts research proposal

Three years funding: Automated Quality Prediction-- Exploiting Knowledge of the Business Case

Paper accepted to ICSM'08

Automated Severity Assessment of Software Defect Reports

Regularities in Learning Defect Predictors

Paper submitted to ASE'08. Collecting large consistent data sets for...

Accidental gay activist

Once upon a time in 1979, I accidently lead the Gay Mardi Gras. At the...

Creation is a predictable, controllable process that can be engineered

Based on the success of the software engineering, I want argue that...

Why I think about Turing Machines

CS and UI is the art of building glass walls to hide users from the computational cliff. Hopefully, most users are blind to how narrow is their treacherous path. But without the language of the Turing machine, you are blind to certain restrictions to writing, unable to explain why your system is broken, unable to avoid that problem in the future.

Automated Severity Assessment of Software Defect Reports

New paper, submission to ICSM'08

2CEE, A Twenty First Century Effort Estimation Methodology:

New conference paper: International Society of Parametric Analysis

Ok, now I get it

Just say a virtualized LINUX installed as a windows app inside a virtualization box. Their package manager was linked to the CSEE package manager and this virtualized app goes looking for updates to the package base every hour. So this stuff auto-updates on a regular basis. What made the demo very impressive was that the last 2 weeks I had to commission 10 new computers. Take what the vendor gives, change that, alter that, etc etc etc. The same task with virtualization technology would have been a 10 minute install on each machine. Easy. So now I get it.

Optimizing Requirements Decisions With KEYS

New paper, PROMISE 2008

Implications of Ceiling Effects in Defect Predictors

New paper, PROMISE 2008

Comparing Design and Code Metrics for Software Quality Prediction

New paper, PROMISE 2008 workshop

New talk

Learning Near Optimum Inspection Policies

Wed Fed 6,11:30am, 2008 WHERE: room 225b, IVV building WHO: (Dr. Tim...

NSF workshop: Software Engineering & Creativity

Creation is a predictable, controllable process that can be engineered (a...

New Grant with Barry Boehm: "CRYSTAL BALL"

How are we to assess the benefits vs cost trade-offs on all these new...

Parametric Analysis of ANTARES Re-entry Guidance Algorithms Using Advanced Test Generation and Data Analysis

Large complex aerospace systems are generally validated in...

New paper

Parametric Analysis of ANTARES Re-entry Guidance Algorithms Using Advanced Test Generation and Data Analysis

Exhaling after 2 NSF grants

So Dec 10 and Jan 17 I had two NSF grant submissions (FYI: "NSF" is short for "no such funding"). And then there was a new subject to prepare for. And then this. And then that. Third week in January, a strange mood came over me. Took me a while to realize what it was- I was relaxed! Not running round like an idiot. Empty in-box on my email (that won't last). Memo: try to space out NSF grants to less than one very month.

FaceBook rules

Joined FaceBook. Its changed my view of the web- all that AJAX...

The LISP attack

My LISP attack continues. I've broken some threshold where now the code...

Beyond Pairwise Testing

The website pairwise.org shows the effects on data set size when a simple...

Torchwood is soooooo gay

Dr. Who was always camp and BBC's Torchwood series is Dr. Who...

New Journal Paper

Learning Better IV&V Practices. To appear in Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, ?March 2008.

A good day

A morning writing NSF grants. Phone calls with folks across the...

New NSF proposal

Exploiting Islands of Certainty in Systems...

On the 12th day of XMAS

My true love gave to me, yet more to write. I was just tallying the words generated by me over the XMAS "holiday". This kind of gives a little insight into the life of an academic: 10 pages: conference paper 8 + 6 pages: two workshop papers 10 pages: technical report for NASA a 20+ pages: NSF proposal Time to rename my web site, I think, to "spell check 'r us".

Rain, rain, go away

Last two winters, driven to Chicago and Chincoteague in...

Video: Markov Logic

Inspiring talk from Pedro Domingos: Learning, Logic, and Probability See also his papers at his AAAI'06 or his 2005 Machine Learning Journal paper.

The Bay Bridge Schmolze

Take spare parts from 14 other bridges, string them together any which way, and you get the wonderful mess that is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at Annapolis.

Student evaluations, Data Mining'07

Good results. High overall ratings, high teaching effectiveness. Highest scores: 100% said "The instructor showed enthusiasms when teaching"; 9 of the 11 respondents answered "Learn?" with "quite a lot" Very few missed classes (10/11 missed 3 classes of less), even though there were no exams in the class. Click to enlarge:

Revenge of the sugar

Sugar-fest'07. The aftermath. Not pretty. Chocolate headache. Coffee shake. Vaguely unsettled. World a little value and murky. Can't tell you the plot of the last three episodes of "24"- I think Jack is torturing someone but can't say who or why.

Twas the night after XMAS

And all through the house, no chocolate remained. Or...

What are you scared of?

Helen woke this morning after her standard nightmare. She was staying at the ...

And the stockings were hung

(By the chimney with care.)

All you'll ever (k)neeeds

And today's score: soccer injury: one Cath: nil

My favorite vampires

Hooray for re-runs. I overdosed on Buffy during her day but I've only...

Accurate Estimates Without Calibration?

Most process models calibrate their internal settings using historical...

Tis the season to be humble. Not.

Have I been naughty or nice? Well, at this time of year I am obliged to...

I said what?

Do I believe in this empirical result? The paper was due in 162 minutes...

Tough job, but someone has to do it

Peyton Fireman, legal eagle, golf star,...

XMAS comes but once a year

"God bless us, every one!"

The gathering storm

There's this moment, about 20 minutes before the party starts, when the...

Home for the holidays

No more commuting to Baltimore, ever again (at least, not for another 6 weeks).

ICSE accepts PROMISE workshop

The ICSE workshop chairs just sent word- the next PROMISE workshop will run May 12-13 at Leipzig, Germany. And, for the first time ever, PROMISE and the related Mining Software Repositories workshop are not on the same date!

Inside the ex-ISR building

From the New York Times, April 18 2006 The most ambitious...

PDA rules!

Got a new Blackberry curve. Finally broken through the PDA barrier. Now I wake up in the morning and I read the news, on my little screen. Found a good Gmail mobile reader- use that all the time now. Welcome to the 21st century. How would of thought it would be less than 2" square?

Paper accepted to IEEE Software

May, 2008: Application of a broad-spectrum quantitative requirements model

New paper:

"Increasing Confidence in Verification Results by Combining Diverse Tools: an Empirical Study" Automated verification tools are capable of detecting subtle errors in models of complex software systems. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to use these tools effectively. Input models must correctly represent essential system behavior. Models must also enable efficient verification in terms of their time and memory requirements. Satisfying these two requirements can be challenging even for experts. But, given a correct model, can a user be confident that the verification results are correct?

Increasing Confidence in Verification Results by Combining Diverse Tools: an Empirical Study

Automated verification tools are capable of detecting subtle errors in...

Donald Boland to defend master's thesis

Title:Data Discretization Simplified: Randomized Binary Search...

Daniel Baker to defend master's thesis

"A Hybrid Approach to Expert and Model Based Effort Estimation" Download...

New research proposal with Uni. Texas (Dallas)

Intelligent Process Definition for Agile Product Line Requirements Engineering Finding hot spots in questionnaire responses using data mining.

New NSF Proposal

Automated Quality Prediction-- Exploiting Knowledge of the Business...

A present from OZ

News from Ron. D.: Well - Thanksgiving has come and gone and here in OZ we...

Upgrades to web site

New page added, just for my talks. Social bookmarking added (see icon, bottom left). Page titles added, specific to each web page (see top of window) Search engine upgraded to Google's new Custom Search beta (try typing stuff into the "Find" box, top right). (Oh, and I've been playing with SQLite, trying to convince myself its time to take the plunge, leave big XML files behind, go fully relational. Another day, perhaps.

Hey, maybe I do have a life

In the last three days: Mucking around in the garden with my wife... ...great boozey Thanksgiving dinner with the neighbors... ...Massive photo attack- driving around for hours catching a sunny winter's day in rural Pennsylvania... ...much XML hacking: new web site... ...planning an AI subject for the spring: collecting cool materials... ... and lots of fun LISP hacking :-)

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Time, once again, for ego repair

Email today. "Decision on your paper". Thrilling! Then you read the review. Thumbs way down. Oh dear... Begin stages of grieving: denial: "say what???!!??"; anger: "reviewers are idiots!"; bargaining: "maybe I can write to the editor?"; depression: "it was a crap paper, they are all out to get me"; acceptance: "oh well, maybe I can rewrite it". How to gauge your academic experience: how long does it take you to run from denial to acceptance. Me, I'm getting better: down to three days.

Graph theory? Art?

Point Marion Bridge, Pennsylvania. Massive, scary, hunk of rusting steel. But how to describe it? Struts over a bridge? Graph theory? Work of art? All three? FYI: due for demolition early in 2008.

The Mathematician's Castle

A very strange building, just down the street, opposite the dog park. No, I don't know its story. But damn, I like it.

Getting good at the XML

Last December, it took me days to get my first RSS feed going In July it...

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Spring 2008 AI subject, now on line

Please see http://menzies.us/csx72.

cs472/cs572: AI and advanced AI

Spring 2008

Invited to IEEE ASE 2008 PC

I'm now a member of the IEEE ASE 2008 program committee. L'Aquila, Italy - September 15-19 2008. If past trends are anything to go by, this will mean reviewing a lot of papers.

Research planning with JPL

This week, much time was devoted to exploring new research ideas with requirements engineering researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

$1.4M proposals to NASA

This week, WVU researchers submitted their 2008 University Initiative proposals to NASA. Totaling more than $1.4M, these proposals review and extend the state of the art in software V&V with a particular focus on early life-cycle model-based software engineering.

Fame is so fleeting

For 48 hours, they all knew my name. Now, I'm so last week. Monday night I...

Help. I like Peter Frampton

Stumbled over a recent concert by Peter Frampton on HD TV. In his...

Bumblebee Bat

According to the Animal Diversity Web, Thailand's...

CocoMonster

I love this bit in Dan's thesis: The 3rd bagging experiment tried involved the creation of an algorithm that creates a learner using every permutation of the feature set. This algorithm was named CocoMonster for its ridiculous computational complexity. There is some kind of intrinsic appeal to overly complex algorithms. One may think, It must be better; its just so...complicated. This is much like the snob factor in economics which leads us to believe that a diamond must be rare and valuable because it costs a lot of money.

Relationship advice

If someone is starting out on an academic career, they really should be...

Attack of the thesis

Autumn. Trees go red, days grow dark, students race to write their thesis in time to graduate before XMAS, and supervisor read hundreds of pages Tuesday night was Dan (120 pages), then DJ (40 pages); Wednesday night, Justin (80 pages). Sent back all these edit notes. Which means tomorrow I should get back Dan (140 pages), DJ (80 ages), Justin (100 pages). And so the cycle of (academic) life continues.

Talk: Open source- can you ignore it?

What is open source? Where did it come from? Why can't you ignore it? Anthropologically: has been with us for centuries Economics: too powerful to ignore Legally: no future without it Technical: unavoidable So what social institutions will be adopted to handle it? | View | Upload your own

Best picture I ever took

Talk 'bout dumb luck. This shot took all of 10ms to set up. Atlantic lighthouse off-shore from Portland, Maine. View bigger and even bigger.

2cee at COCOMO forum

Dr. Jairus Hihn (JPL), Prof. Tim Menzies (WVU), and Karen Lum were ...

Bernd Fischer isa muppet?

Left: a fraggle muppet. Right: Bernd Fischer. Your call.

Rewriting AI history

One of the standard stories of AI is that a system called DART saved the Army so...

ASE'07=excellent

ASE 2007 was my definition of a good conference. At day 3 lunch, every seat was...

This beach is closed

Ozzie boy meets North American autumn. Autumn wins.

The chair, the chair

Every conference I go to has this chair. Exactly this chair. I think it is in love with me.

New talk: The Business Case for Automated Software Engineering

IEEE Automated Software Engineering, Nov, 2007, Atlanta, USA. ASE...

New talk: Nighthawk: Two-Level Genetic-Random Unit Test Data Generator

ASE 2007. Paper available on-line. Randomized testing has been shown to be an effective method for testing software units. However, the thoroughness of randomized unit testing varies widely according to the settings of certain parameters, such as the relative frequencies with which methods are called. In this paper, we describe a system which uses a genetic algorithm to find parameters for randomized unit testing that optimize test coverage. We compare our coverage results to previous work, and report on case studies and experiments on system options. | View | Upload your own

Helen vs the hurricane

Had a little Pacific northwest experience last week. But in the Atlantic...

New talk: If you fix everything, you have nothing left to lose

On the Value of Stochastic Abduction (if you fix everything, you lose fixes for everything else) International workshop on living with uncertainty. 2007. Creative solutions can sometimes be found in larger space of possible qualitative behaviors than in the tighter space of precise quantitative behaviors. To put that another way: If you fix everything, you loss fixes for everything else. We illustrate this effect with an example from software process theory. | View | Upload your own

Missing: ghosts and ghouls

What if you threw a satanic ritual and no one came? Halloween'07 I made...

New talk: Multi-implications of multi-dimensional authoring: or, everything you wanted to know about geek herding, but were afraid to ask

SLS, 2007 If a stone tablet doubles in size, it weighs eight times as...

New paper: Application of a broad-spectrum quantitative requirements model to early-lifecycle decision making

During the early phases of projects life cycles, detailed information is scarce; yet there is frequent need to make key decisions, especially those concerning tradeoffs among quality requirements. Trading among competing concerns occurs in many fields, e.g. systems engineering, hardware engineering, and software engineering. Here, we report on our design and use of a model to help make requirements decisions that applies to all of these fields. To do so, we employ a model based upon coarse quantification of the factors involved. We illustrate our approach with fragments taken from some of our studies of software technologies.

End of Spam?

About 3 weeks ago, I replaced my email text (see above) with an image file showing the same information. And my spam has fallen right away. No longer, it seems, can I make money from an accountancy mistake in Nigeria. And an 8" penis (that satisfies her all night long) it out of the question. Fine by me. Nigeria can keep its cash and she if she wants those eight inches, she can take the pills herself. Just as long as I don't get all that damned spam.

On a road to somewhere

In Australia, there is one (or two) places to drive. The Princess Highway...

Very stimulating week

And by "stimulating", I mean I can barely remember it all. The week started in...

Post-modern poem

I love this postmodern poem. At first glance, it looks like a shopping...

New Paper: Just Enough Learning (of Association Rules): The TAR2 Treatment Learner

An over-zealous machine learner can automatically generate large, intricate, the- theories which can be hard to understand. However, such intricate learning is not necessary in domains that lack complex relationships. A much simpler learner can suffice in domains with narrow funnels; i.e. where most domain variables are controlled by a very small subset.

New paper: Cross- vs Within-Company Defect Prediction

In a recent May 2007 IEEE TSE article, Kitchenham et.al. explored effort...

Cross- vs Within-Company Defect Prediction Studies

In a recent May 2007 IEEE TSE article, Kitchenham et.al. explored...

New talk: "STAR"- seeking new frontiers in cost modeling

2007 COCOMO forum. STAR has 3 key advantages over traditional methods and even 2cee: Provides an integrated set of COCOMO models Can be used to systematically analyze strategic and tactical policy decisions Can be tuned/calibrated with constraint sets instead of traditional historical records. STAR is an abductive inference engine that applies simulated annealing to a treatment learner. | View | Upload your own

New talk: "2cee" a 21st century effort estimation method

2007 COCOMO forum. It became quickly apparent in the early states of our research that there was a major disconnect between the techniques used by estimation practitioners and the numerous ideas being addressed in the research community. Many fundamental estimation questions were not being addressed. We had to fix all that. | View | Upload your own

Spiders vs Volcanoes

Some things never change. I was at dinner the other night and the North...

218,000 times faster

Omid Jalali has a nice new result, a 200,000 fold increase in runtimes out...

Grass is always greener

Helen called me from D.C. She was at dinner at someone's house...

Still state of the art

I wrote a TSE article in January on defect prediction (Data Mining Static...

Once again, the busy season is here.

UIs to write by Oct 23; two NSF proposals for Dec 10, Jan 10; journal papers to finish, new papers to write, SLS and ASE conferences in two weeks....

New paper, "The Value of Stochastic Abduction", to appear IWLU'07

Back in the 1980s, the model-based diagnosis (MBD) community explored...

Photos at Helen's Fell's Point flat

Ain't nothing wrong with coming here every few weeks.

Photos from NASA's 2007 Software Assurance Symposium

September 25, 26, 27, 2007

Saving it for 'ron

Once there was an Aussie called Tim who lived for years in...

Why the question mark in the American anthem?

Went to Port McHenry today where, in 1814, the Brits shelled the...

We'll have a gay old time

Seem in Baltimore harbor- cargo ship with a fabulous paint job. As a matter of fact, the use of this color scheme was discontinued after the sister ship to this vessel had a near miss with an amorous blue whale. They decided to stay just good friends and meet for coffee, whenever they're both in town.

R.I.P. Uncle Gordon

My uncle, Gordon Donaldson, was an assoc/prof of electrical...

New Talk: Software Development Cost: How Much? You Sure?

"Cost" is a quality issue. If development costs is underestimated, developers will be forced into many quality-threatening cost-cutting measures. A major reason for poor software cost estimation is that NASA's managers don't have enough relevant information. Also, current cost models are brittle and improperly tuned. We fix all that.

New talk: Improving IV&V Techniques Through the Analysis of Anomalies

We seek an active monitoring framework where data collected during an active IV\&V project will trigger an alert if a project becomes "unusual" (and defining "unusual" is one of the goals of this project).

The key to it all

When I was 12, the pinnacle of hi-tech Sci Fi was Crichton's "The...

Young hopeful (?hopeless) writer, lost in the big city

Here's a photo from the vault. That's me on the left at a conference I...

I itch

Helen took out some poison ivy in the yard, then left for Baltimore. The cat, bless her, inspected the carnage then came to me for some loving. "Mummy is not here", she whined, "who will worship me?". Well, it turns out that Lucie the Cat is a vengeful god. After I preened and petted her, all the poison ivy has made my arms and chest erupt in little welts that feel so GOOD to scratch then scream at you for hours afterwards. Helen! Come back! Face the wrath of Lucie! And let the garden grow, dammit!

Ain't nothing wrong with Baltimore

Helen and me are playing city mouse and country mouse. Weekends are spent...

Busy as a bumble bee

Rate of blogging falling off. What can I say? I think "start of term"...

New paper: Software Effort Estimation and Conclusion Stability

This paper revisits the "conclusion instability" problem identified by Kitchenham, Foss, Myrtveit et.al.: i.e. conclusions regarding which software effort estimation method is "best" is highly contingent on the evaluation criteria and the subset of the data used in the evaluation. Using non-parametric methods (the Mann-Whitney U test), we show how to avoid conclusion instability. This paper reports a study that ranked 158 effort estimation methods via three different evaluation criteria and hundreds of different randomly selected subsets. The same four methods were ranked higher than the other 154 methods regardless of which evaluation criteria or data subset was applied.

Software Effort Estimation and Conclusion Stability

This paper revisits the "conclusion instability" problem...

Talk: Data Mining, Truth, Justice, the American Way, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster

President Bush advises that students should be exposed to many different schools of though. In this matter, he is less than totally correct. An important part of science is to expose people to the critical and continual (re)evaluation of ideas. Otherwise, any nonsense can be shoved down our throats such as pirates are causing global warming. So this talk concerns notions of certainty and standards for debate. One surprise will be that nothing is "true" (in a scientific sense) but many more things are false. Implications for humility, tolerance, and justice will be discussed.

Are our systems "safe"?

SAVVY is a joint venture between Global Science Technologies and LCSEE WVU. A NASA STTR proposal, SAVVY addresses the issue of "our our systems safe"? SAVVY watches an operating system and learns what "abnormal" means. Incremental Bayesian anomaly detection then alerts the operator if a problem is seen and contrast set learners propose repair actions. SAVVY has an ultra-low overhead: it is both highly memory efficient and can operate using a single pass through data.

Abstracts accepted to the 2007 COCOMO forum

Two abstracts on 21st Century Effort Estimation and the STAR decision support tool have been accepted to the 2007 COCOMO forum. The authors are the usual suspects from WVU ( me, Dan Baker, Omid Jalali, Our Elwaras) and JPL (Jairus Hihn, Karen Lum).

New project: Understanding STEP

STEP is a standard for engineering documents recorded in...

Talk: when good data goes bad

abstract: In five case studies with real-world NASA data, automatic data mining methods found clear quality predictors (effort, defects). Strange to say, in only one of those cases is that data source still active. Why do organizations ignore all this, clearly useful, data? What to do? speaker:Tim Menzies when:Wednesday August 23, 12:30am where:Eisland lab G29 download:http://menzies.us/pdf/07goodbad.pdf

Applied Technology Lab a "Virtual" Success

This summer, the NASA/WVU Applied Technology Lab hosted four interns from...

Johnson Space Flight Center expresses interest in Treatment Learning

Historical note: The TAR3 "Treatment Learner" is a special kind of minimal...

The Horror of Drive-Thru

#include pinchOfSalt.h Somethings are so common, we don't give them a...

Welcome to the start of term

Can't even begin to list last week. Such a blur of...

WVU data miners deployed at JPL

The "2cee" software effort estimation tool combines Monte...

New research project with GrammaTech

One of the long standing problems in software quality assessment is the rapid recognition of dangerous software. Our feature extractors for software are decades old- lies of code measures, simplistic intra-module metrics, etc. Working with GrammaTech's advanced compiler technology, WVU researchers will seek better measures, that can be quickly generated earlier in the coding life cycle.

BOOK(S): Val McDermid's Tony Hill novels

Welcome inside the mind of a serial killer. Are you enjoying the view? Val...

BOOK(S): Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy

Relentless poverty. Foul mouth Irish. Little hope for the...

BOOK(S): Jeff Lindsay's "Dexter" series

A nice bit of light-hearted homicidal mania In Darkly Dreaming Dexter, our...

Never fly with U.S. Airways

Oh the horror, the horror, that is U.S. Airways customer...

Proof that the English are insane

Behold the pickled body of Jeremy Betham, one of the founders of...

In England, fantasies can be local.

Late at night I lie in my London hotel room, trapped by jet lag, and...

M'Town to London Town

Racing to the airport and got there late. Wrecks on the freeway to scare...

I'd forgotten about back packs

I'd forgotten what it was like for you to be the mule and the pack to...

One new paper accepted to IEEE ISSRE 2007 (30 percent acceptance rate)

"Fault Prediction using Early Life cycle Data" This was one written with Yue Jiang and Bojan Cukic. We show that combining information sources from across the life cycle increases predictor effectiveness.

Two new papers accepted to IEEE ASE 2007 (11 percent acceptance rate)

One paper accepted was "The Business Case for Automated Software Engineering". The other one, "Nighthawk: A Two-Level Genetic-Random Unit Test Data Generator" was written by Jamie Andrews and I consulted on the random search stuff.

The PROMISE repository- an "important initiative"

In a recent paper on the future of software engineering at ICSE'07, international effort estimation guru Martin Shepperd writes about the PROMISE data repository: Until recently the topic of what data are used to evaluate various competing prediction systems has scarcely been considered. An important initiative by Menzies et al. has been to promote a systematic collection of properly documented and catalogued data. This has been motivated by various concerns not least the difficulty of replicating other researchers work when the data are not made publicly available. -- Software project economics: a road map - ICSE 2007

Unmentionables

When I grew up I was told that some subjects were "unmentionables", not part...

Wanted: data mining students

Are you interested in data mining? If not, why not? Is there anything more...

Guess what happens if you eat

For the last two weeks I've been doing this South Beach diet phase 1...

Sssh... don't tell anyone, but I seem to be up to date

This has to be a mistake: Research deliverables all...

Towards a mental model of NASA-based research

So with Lisa Montgomery and Frank Gmeindl, we starting...

It's my birthday and I'll eat if I want to

47 today (well, yesterday actually, 16,158 ...

WVU researchers visit "Rocket City"

"The speed of light is too slow", says Dr. Reagan Moore. "It takes 60ms, at...

WVU CSEE one of world's top 50 SE schools

The June 2007 issue of the Communications of the ACM ranked WVU CSEE in the top 50 of all SE schools, in the world. The table on p84 of the article tells the story. Little old WVU with its 5 SE researchers scores nearly as well as certain powerhouses of SE research such as the NASA Ames Research Center.

Renovations to commence for NASA/ATL lab

Currently, the ATL lab has all its desks around the walls. This is not supportive of group work so NASA has approved funds for renovations to create island work spaces.

Got a minute?

When you get a second, if you've got a minute, can you spare me some time? I'll buy...

How did we land on the moon?

Last week, on July 20th, was the first time we walked on the moon. ...

Harry Potter magic

"Attention muggles. Please register your broom for the broom judging contest by...

Where have all the blokes gone?

The car's iPod decided to play lots of Cold Chisel (try saying that in the 20th...

Working the cash flow

NASA IV&V set me chasing the cash flow of the WVU grant funds inside NASA's financial system. After ringing the contact names they gave me, I found (a) who was looking after this one and (b) that there was a little extra information needed to get the $$$ moving. So IV&V got the extra information together and I nudged the person looking after it. Net result, hopefully: the funds will be transferred in week(s), not months.

Special issues

Journal of Empirical Software Engineering: Repeatable Experiments in SE; Information Retrieval for Program Comprehension

Special issue: Repeatable Experiments in SE

Edited by me.

Special Issue on Information Retrieval for Program Comprehension

Edited by Letha Ezthorn for the EMSE journal.

Subodh Chaudhari

Dr. Menzies is a thesis committee member for... Student Enrollment...

Member of 2 new workshops

SOTA'07 and IWLU'07.

"Geez, this owright."

(Translation: the current situation is above satisfactory).So sayeth Ron...

TeraByte Tim

What do you do with a terabyte of on-line storage? Please, I want to know. Each week, my ISP gives me another 2GB of storage, free of charge (just another example of the excellent service at Dreamhost.com). It accumulates and now I have, wait for it, over a terabyte of storage (well, 1,024,256 MB to be exact). The thing of it is this- I only use 18GB of it all. So all those bits at my command and I have nothing to say to them. Do they get lonely?

Return of the Diet

On the holiday, I started real good but got read bad, real fast. On day one, I was...

White paper to DOD

With George Trapp , white paper submission to a DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative on Assured Trusted Information.

Visiting NASA, west coast

I was at JPL July 9,10,11 then at NASA AMES July 12 ...

IEEE TSE accepts "Problems with Precision"

To appear, September 2007.

Kids=no

Honest, we ain't kidding. No kids. Ever. Just not interested. Our genes...

How much do I believe in open source licenses?

Dilemma: someone want to use one of my digital products (hooray) without ...

San Francisco- what a quaint little village

After 3 days in L.A. I came to S.F. and drove on Highway 101. After the madness of...

Justin Di Stefano

Jan '08. Indusrial data mining methods for learning software defect predictors. Papers: Tim Menzies, Justin S. Di Stefano: More Success and Failure Factors in Software Reuse. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 29(5): 474-477 (2003) more

L.A. = a mirage of an illusion in the desert

What does it mean that I find NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab more "real" than the rest of...

L.A. : mega-myths made real

Today, driving round L.A.: Warm weather and blue sky. Too blue. Suspiciously blue. Massive palm trees lining the street rearing up into the sky. I mean really, palm trees are never that tall. Flocks of cars like ballet companies on the freeways, engaged in some elaborate opera. It occurred to me that it looked like a place made up to look like L.A.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter (of Data)

Flew Pittsburgh to Pasadena today, all the way reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Meanwhile, I was looking forward to running Omid Jalali's Mann-Wilcox' scripts on Yue Jiang new ROC curve data. So while I was reading of a serial murderer lusting over his next victim, I lusted over data with (almost) the same intensity.

IEEE Computer accepts "Strangest Thing About Software"

For the Jan '07 issue.

Summer drive to Gulf of Mexico

Last week of June, first week of July, we jumped in the car with the aim of...

Career

Associate Professor: 1/06 to present: Lane Department of Computer...

Quick Bio

Quick bio: Dr. Tim Menzies (tim@menzies.us) has been working on...

Omid Jalali

Evaluation Bias in Effort Estimation. Found an improvement to my Nov 2006 TSE paper that dramatically improves software cost estimation, over and above previous high water marks (we are currently writing this one up for TSE).

Ous Elrawas

Decision Support for Search-Based Software Engineering. Paper(s): The Business Case for Automated Software Engineering Developed and delivered to NASA AMES research center a state of the art software incremental machine learning environment for finding software process options that reduce software cost, number of defects, and residual project risk.

Donald (D.J.) Boland

Jan'08: Stochastic Discretization

Dan Baker

Jan '08: Environments for Effort Estimation Developed and delivered to NASA's Jet propulsion Laboratory and novel, state of the art software cost estimation workbench to be used at NASA to estimate the software costs of deep space missions At the time of this writing (July 2007), Dan is working at his summer job: on-site at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he is porting his tools into the JPL environment.

Amir Jalali

Jan '08: Learning better product line architectures. Co-supervised with Dr. Hany Ammar.

Nathential Jones

Jan '08: Text Mining

Brian Sower

Jan '08: Faster game design using data miners

David Owen

Dr. Menzies was the thesis committee co-chair for... Combining Complementary Formal Verification Strategies to Improve Performance and Accuracy : defended June 15, 2007 Slides : http://menzies.us/pdf/07owen.pdf Software : http://unbox.org/wisp/tags/lurch/1.1 Papers: The Strangest Thing About Software, January 2007, IEEE Computer. Effectively Combining Software Verification Strategies: Understanding Different Assumptions, ISSRE 2006 more

cs493A: Introduction to Open Source

a.k.a. "How to work well with millions of people, that you've never meet" Last offered: Spring 2007 Next offered: Spring 2008 (sorry, cancelled for the spring) rm243 MRB-E, Tues/Thurs, 3:30pm, spring'07

cs591o: Data Mining

a.k.a. "Finding the diamonds in the dust". Last offered: Fall 2006 Next offered: Fall 2007 Tues,Thurs, 3:30, room 401 ESB

Explanation vs Performance in Data Mining: A Case Study with Predicting Runaway Projects

Often, the explanatory power of a learned model must be traded off against...

Associate Professor

Lane Department of Computer Science, WVU, WV. I teach data mining, agents, programming languages & artificial intelligence.

Member, editorial boards

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering; Automated Software Engineering; Empirical Software Engineering; Journal of Visual Languages & Computing.

Program Committees, etc (recent)

Co-chair, PROMISE workshop 2006,2005; PC member, Traceability in Emerging forms of SE , 2007.

Program Committees, etc

co-PC chair for ASE'12. Steering committee chair PROMISE'12. Organizer: RAISE'12 PC member: ASE'12, PROMISE'12, MSR'12, RAIISE'12, EMSE'12.

Yet another web site

New look and feel to the my web site. All content here generated from XML files and imported via PHP scripts calling XSLT or XPATH tricks.

photo

Me, at ICSE 2007 (pic thanks to Steve Easterbrook).

position

assoc. prof. cs, wvu, usa

degrees

phd, com. sci., ai, unsw, oz

location

Room 841a, ESB building, Evansdale campus, WVU; - 80 mins to Pittsburgh - 3.5 hrs to Washington - 3.5 hrs to Baltimore

snail mail

Lane Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University Morgantown, WV 26506-610

email

tim@menzies.us

White paper to ONR

With Ali Feliachi and Karl Schoder, white paper on model validation and verification.

Vacation to hills and oceans

Just back from fantastic vacation: hills and oceans of (West) Virginia .

IEEE TSE accepts 2 articles

IEEE TSE accepts defects and effort estimation papers, pending minor revisions.

New draft: Making sense of requirements, sooner

Draft to IEEE Computer: Making sense of requirements, sooner .

New paper: Bayesian anomaly detection

New ICML'06 workshop paper: Bayesian Anomaly Detection (BAD v0.1) .

RE'06 panel of requirements traceability

RE'06 panel briefing: Requirements Traceability .

Give us this day our daily sin wave

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Rust goes with orange

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Blue

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That's _Dr_ saggy baggy elephant to you

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Fishin'

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All hands on deck

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After the storm, the weary rest

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Before the storming, open the mind

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Ayse looks cool, Greg looks aloof

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coffeeTerrace2

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Mud, Romania

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PRIMISE'10 and ICSM

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Downtown real estate

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Main town square

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Thomas, Elaine, Ayse

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Thomas (the other Thomas) in full flight

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