Academia on Patrick Lam

Graduate Seminar Presentation & Discussion Tips

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Updated January 3, 2022 for Winter 2022 offering of SASE.

In which I share my opinions about what makes for a good paper presentation for a graduate seminar course, say ECE 750-T5.

Logistics

We’ll aim for talks of about 30 minutes. During the discussion period (Wednesdays), the presenter will kick off the discussion by summarizing their evaluation, and we’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each paper and how it can inspire your future work (whether academic or industrial).

SE Student Support

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I gave a presentation about the Software Engineering undergraduate program at Waterloo.

I got a question which I took offline about student support at Waterloo. I think it’s worthwhile to post this here. I am adding some comments from Derek Rayside, current SE Director. Response follows.

Thanks for your question about study skills and student support etc. That could be a whole other talk!

As came up in the talk, we’re privileged at Waterloo SE to be able to be highly selective with respect to admissions. But, as I mentioned, we still have students, especially in first year, who learn things about themselves that maybe they hadn’t anticipated learning. (“Oh actually I’m much more interested in Psychology than Software Engineering!”) As well as previously-undiscovered mental health issues.

Recommendation Letter for Laurie Hendren

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendation letter for CS-Can Lifetime Achievement Award

I am writing to strongly endorse the nomination of Prof. Laurie Hendren for a posthumous Award for Lifetime Achievement in Computer Science. I’m honoured and also sad to be writing this letter. I’ll get back to it later, but no mention of Laurie would be complete without discussing her infectious laugh, which somewhat offsets the sadness.

Laurie has been an inspiration and role model for me from 1998 through 2018 as an undergraduate student, postdoc, faculty member, and administrator. I hope that in my own career I can continue Laurie’s outstanding legacy to some extent. I’ll mostly describe my perspective on her teaching and research, which were parts of her job that she obviously loved.

Lexicon

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

Pre-batical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
Usage. Her pre-batical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.

Lexicon

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lexicon

Here are some academic terms that I’ve invented.

Pre-battical. A one-year postdoc taken straight out of one's PhD, after obtaining a tenure-track Assistant Professorship, but before starting said professorship.
Usage. Her pre-battical at UW turbocharged the start of her independent research career and let her branch out into that up-and-coming field.
Associate professor purgatory. The period a few years after returning from one's post-tenure sabbatical where one is no longer protected from service but still expected to constantly ramp up research productivity.
Usage. Joe's swamped with grant proposal writing and committee meetings in his associate professor purgatory.
Meeting spam. Presentations at meetings where the presenters feel that the participants should know about a topic, but where the participants' time cost exceeds the expected value to them.
Usage. "Gee, I sure didn't get much out of that meeting spam."

Academic Tree circa 2003

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Pull requests accepted!

https://github.com/patricklam/plam.new-webpage

Henry M. Foley (physics)
+--Joseph Frederick Traub (1959, from Columbia) [Columbia] (quantum)
                http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~traub/
   +--Hsiang Tsung Kung (1973, from CMU) [Harvard] (networks)
                http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~htk/
       +--Baudet, Gerard M. (78, from CMU)
       +--Cohn, Robert J. (92, from CMU)*
       +--Fisher, Allan L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Foster, Michael J. (84, from CMU)
       +--Hsu, Feng-hsiung (89, from CMU)
       +--Lam, Monica S. (87, from CMU) [Stanford]
          +--Michael Wolf, (August 1992, from Stanford)
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism and Locality in Nested Loops".
          +--Michael Smith (November 1992, from Stanford) [Harvard]
             Thesis: "Support for Speculative Execution in High-Performance 
                      Processors".
          +--Todd Mowry (March 1994, from Stanford) [CMU]
             Thesis: "Tolerating Latency Through Software-Controlled Data Prefetching".
          +--Martin Rinard (August 1994, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "The Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Jade, 
                      a Portable, Implicitly Parallel Programming Language"
             +---Pedro Diniz (May 1997, from UCSB) [ISI]
                 Thesis: "Commutativity Analysis: A New Analysis Framework 
                          for Parallelizing Compilers"
             +---Radu Rugina (January 2002, from UCSB) [Cornell]
          +--Daniel Scales (December 1995, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Efficient Shared Objects for Distributed Address Space Machines"
          +--Saman Amarasinghe (January 1997, from Stanford) [MIT]
             Thesis: "Parallelizing Compiler Techniques Based on Linear Inequalities"
          +--Jennifer Anderson (March 1997, from Stanford) [VMWare]
             Thesis: "Automatic Computation and Data Decomposition 
                      for Multiprocessors"
          +--Robert Wilson (December 1997, from Stanford) [Tensilica]
             Thesis: "Efficient Context-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C Programs"
          +--Jason Nieh (December 1998, from Stanford) [Columbia]
             Thesis: "The Design Implementation and Evaluation of SMART: 
                      A Scheduler for Multimedia Applications"
          +--Shih-wei Liao (August 2000, from Stanford) [Intel Research]
             Thesis: "SUIF Explorer: an Interactive and Interprocedural Parallelizer"
          +--Brian Schmidt (August 2000, from Stanford) [Kealia]
             Thesis: "Supporting Ubiquitous Computing with Stateless Consoles 
                      and Computation Caches"
          +--Patrick Sathyanathan (June 2001, from Stanford) [HP]
             Thesis: "Interprocedural Data Flow Analysis--Alias Analysis"
          +--Amy Lim (September 2001, from Stanford) [Axis]
             Thesis: "Improving Parallelism And Data Locality With Affine Partitioning"
       +--Lehman, Philip L. (84, from CMU)
       +--Leiserson, Charles E. (81, from CMU)
       +--Oflazer, Kemal (87, from CMU)
       +--Pieper, Jon (93, from CMU)*
       +--Printz, Harry (91, from CMU)
       +--Robinson, John T. (82, from CMU)
       +--Song, Siang W. (81, from CMU)
       +--Sussman, Alan (91, from CMU)*
       +--Thompson, Clark D. (80, from CMU)
       +--Wu, I-Chen (93) 
   +-- Don Heller (PhD, 1977, from CMU)
+-- Joseph Sucher (PhD, 1957, from Columbia) [Maryland] (theoretical physics)
    Thesis: "Energy levels of the two-electron atom, to order 3 Rydberg."

* - Co-Chairman

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