ST /

ST2014-05

(One of the ST Division Meetings.)

ST 2014-05-16: 11.00-12.00 in EDIT-8103

Agenda: (inspired by PAID discussions with PhD students and Junior faculty)

  • The future of the Fire system for electronic lab hand-ins (Pablo Buiras)
    • Improving the hosting infrastructure to avoid downtimes around submission deadlines.
    • Some basic functionality is missing: notifications, correct assignment distribution among graders, overview of the number of accepted/rejected groups.
    • Some PhD students are already working on it. Remember to send bugs and feature requests to the bug tracker: https://bitbucket.org/cse-fire/fire/issues/1
      • Do we need more developers?
  • Swedish courses (John Camilleri)
    • A questionnaire about Swedish courses was distributed amongst PhD students at CSE (results here)
    • Of 26 respondents, 65% are not satisfied with current situation.
    • At a PhD council meeting on 2014-05-09 we discussed the responses and came up with the following suggestions:
      1. Motivation is often quite low
        • Most just do it for social integration
        • But there are no clear, quantifiable goals
        • This makes it easy to forget everything afterwards
        • Being able to teach in Swedish would be a good goal, but it's very unclear what the requirement actually is for us
      2. More intense courses
        • ~2 hours per week with minimal homework is not enough
        • More hours per week would be more effective
        • We would want to get compensated with credits or hours, to justify the increased effort
      3. What happens after the course
        • Some ongoing forum where we can keep practicing
        • This could be organised as a fika, conversation group, film club or similar
        • Ideally guided by someone with some experience in Swedish education
        • Presence/participation of Swedish natives would also be welcome
      4. Ideally we can improve things without spending anything extra
        • Re-distributing what is already spent on Swedish tuition
        • Organise conversation groups ourselves
  • Admin support

Information

  • Medarbetarundersökning 19 maj!
    • Please participate in the Chalmers-wide employee survey on May 19 (deadline 2014-06-02)
  • Recent thesis defenses
    • Michal Palka
      • 2014-04-25, 10:00, room EA, ED&IT building
      • Random Structured Test Data Generation for Black-Box Testing
      • Opponent: Prof. John Regehr, School of Computing, University of Utah, USA
    • Willard Rafnsson
      • 2014-04-29, 10:00, room HC4, Hörsalsvägen.
      • Securing Interactive Systems
      • Opponent: Prof. Fred B. Schneider, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
  • (somewhat) new employees
    • 2014-05-01: Daniel Schoepe Doktorand room 5449 x1061 ST
    • 2014-05-01: Michał Pałka, PostDoc on PROWESS (with JoHu)
    • 2014-05-01: Willard Rafnsson, PostDoc on ERC (with AnSa)