Colloquium Details
The Golem: Open Source In The Academy
| Author: | Bart Massey Portland State University |
|---|---|
| Date: | May 25, 2006 |
| Time: | 15:30 |
| Location: | 220 Deschutes |
| Host: | Virginia Lo |
Abstract
The "open source" movement has roots as old as computing, but in the last few years it has burst upon the consciousness of the computing community and the general public. Academic reaction to open source has been mixed, and has to some degree followed patterns established in previous responses to new approaches to computing, faddish or otherwise.
Today, there are several commonly-voiced and sensible-sounding objections to the computer scientist wishing to pursue a career in open source: open source isn't science; open source isn't "even" engineering; open source is so broad and ill-defined as to not be anything. (This list omits several other minor objections.)
In this talk, I propose answers to all of these objections. Further, I describe a synthesis that suggests that technically-oriented open source researchers will be at the forefront of academia's most exciting new area of scholarship.
As promised by the title, there will be a golem in the talk.
Biography
Bart Massey is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University, working on open source software engineering and artificial intelligence. Bart's open source development experience includes NASA-funded rocket avionics, X Window System infrastructure, a programming language, and mentoring many student projects. Bart received a thesis Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon in 1992 for research in concurrent logic programming language implementation. He received his Doctoral Degree from the University of Oregon in 1999 for work on general-purpose planning at the Computational Intelligence Research Laboratory.