[CSENews] [Fwd: CSE Lecture Series, Dr. Greg Wilson, Friday, 11:30am, 1279 Anthony]

[Teresa Isela VanderSloot]

All students invited.....



*2010-2011 CSE Lecture Series* <http://www.cse.msu.edu/?Pg=129&amp;Col=2>


Title: *Bits of Evidence: What We Actually Know About Software 
Development, and Why We Believe It's True*
Speaker: *Dr. Greg Wilson**, Software Carpentry*

Date:   Friday, September 10, 2010
Time:  11:30 am
Room: 1279 Anthony Hall

Host: C. Titus Brown 

Abstract:

By the time the Seven Years War ended in 1763, Britain had lost 1512 
sailors in action, but almost 100,000 to scurvy---despite the fact that 
a Scottish surgeon had shown twenty years earlier that a little lemon 
juice every day was enough to prevent or cure the dreaded ailment. It 
was more than a century before medical practitioners began paying 
attention to controlled trials of this kind.  Today, though, most 
practitioners accepted that decisions about the care of individual 
patients should be based on conscientious, explicit, and judicious use 
of current best evidence.

The idea that claims about software development practices should be 
based on evidence is still foreign to software developers, but this is 
finally starting to change: any academic who claims that a particular 
tool or practice makes software development faster, cheaper, or more 
reliable is now expected to back up that claim with some sort of 
empirical study. Such studies are difficult to do well, but hundreds 
have now been published covering almost every aspect of software 
development. This talk will look at some of the best of those studies, 
which are as elegant as classic experiments in physics, psychology, and 
other scientific disciplines.

Biography: 

Greg Wilson is the chief scientist on Software Carpentry, an intensive 
introduction to fundamental computational skills for scientists and 
engineers.  He has worked over the past 25 years in high-performance 
scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security, and has 
been on the editorial board of "Doctor Dobb's Journal" and "Computing in 
Science and Engineering".  His most recent books are "Data Crunching" 
(Pragmatic, 2005), "Beautiful Code" (O'Reilly, 2007), and "Practical 
Programming" (Pragmatic, 2009).  Greg received a Ph.D. in Computer 
Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1993. 

-- 
Teresa Isela VanderSloot, MSA
Academic Specialist/Adviser
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
College of Engineering
Michigan State University
3201 Engineering Building
East Lansing, Mi 48824
(517) 353-5455

To Schedule an appointment, visit: https://www.egr.msu.edu/adcalendar/

Web: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~iselava1/