Wed. March 12, Ned Gulley on Patterns of Innovation and Collaboration in an Online Programming Contest
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its
weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 319
Topic: Patterns of Innovation and Collaboration in an Online Programming Contest
Speaker: Ned Gulley
Abstract:
Programming contests have become a regular feature of geek culture.
These contests may bring all the participants to one location, or they
may be mediated by the Net, but they tend to share a common format:
given a specific problem and working alone, you have a limited amount
of time to write better code than anyone else. This kind of contest is
a good measure of the talent of isolated individuals, but not of the
collective talent of the entire group. What if there were a contest
that more accurately modeled the way ideas really move through the
world? Suppose, once an idea had been put forward by one person, it
could immediately be freely adopted and modified by anyone else, even
as the contest continued? The winning entry for this kind of contest
would be an amalgamated effort by many people, people who were
simultaneously competing and collaborating. This approach is more like
the messy, organic way in which much software, particularly open
source software, actually gets built. Presumably, then, an open source
programming contest might show us something about how innovation works
in the real world. For several years, we have been running exactly
this kind of contest using the MATLAB programming language, and the
results have given us a fascinating quantitative perspective on the
dynamics of innovation and reward in collaborative programming. This
talk will treat some of the patterns of collaboration that we have
seen in our contest.
Bio:
Ned Gulley works at The MathWorks, Inc. as part of the team that makes
MATLAB. Ned joined the company in 1991 and has led the development of
the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox and the MATLAB IDE team. Since 2001, he has
been leading the MATLAB Central web community team. These days he’s
particularly in the overlap between technical and social computing.
Prior to The MathWorks, Ned was an aerospace engineer working on
flight control research and simulation at NASA Ames Research Center in
Mountain View, California. Ned holds a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering from Princeton University and an MSE in Aeronautical and
Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University.
Resources
MATLAB Central: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/
The MATLAB Programming Contest: http://www.mathworks.com/contest/overview.html
“In Praise of Tweaking”, a paper on the contest:
http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.html
Ned’s Blog: http://www.starchamber.com/
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