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)