Research Team Leader Application: Maximilian Scholz

[sims1253]

Bio

I am Maximilian Scholz and sometimes called the Secretary of Offtopic (mainly by myself). I joined coala in early 2015 but real contributions started this year. I mainly work on coala by giving input on design questions and administrative tasks. But my biggest impact on coala probably was on the community work during the second GSoC coala participated in and my conference visits. From that time the title Secretary of Offtopic stems.
Since then I mainly worked on management and organisation aspects while writing my thesis together with coala.
My thesis is the reason why I am interested in building a research team. It was fun and interesting writing my own code analysis and evaluating it.

coala Contributions so far

My main contributions were being an admin for the 2016 GSoC and the community bonding work I did during that time (gaming evenings and group calls for discussions) as well as the pre-evaluation checkups on the mentors. This community work has, to a lesser extend, continued.
Currently I am leading the teams initiative and rewriting my thesis code to make it clean and useful.
I also attended quite some conferences to represent coala.

And I wrote the teams cEP.

Road to the Future

The idea for this team had two aspects. Improving coala architecture and writing our own analysis routines.
I will focus on increasing the amount of native algorithms for coala, mainly due to my lack of coala core architecture knowledge. If developers with the needed experience in core architecture join the team I will happily help organizing and supervising work in that area too.

For the algorithms I want to get universities interested in working with us. This would involve students writing a thesis about code analysis and doing their implementation in coala. This has the added benefit of evaluation for the algorithms which directly tells us how good they are.
Another approach is to find scholarships or companies that support a developer in a similar way GSoC does for writing analysis that is needed and not yet available. This would lead to unique features for coala and an increased amount of payed development on coala.
Organizing this outreaching effort would be the foundation to then grow a research team around people that are interested in either developing algorithms or helping in with the organization.

Finally I want to give developers that do create new unique features the opportunity to present the work on conferences. This again could be done with the money from companies/scholarships and is important for me because appreciation is an important aspect of motivating people.

[sils]

@sims1253 a lot of this seems like a rather long term goal, do you have some concrete measures that you will implement to increase coala's presence in research?

[sims1253]

@sils I feel like getting coala into research hast to be done kind of long term ish.
There were two theses written with coala but I don't feel that this improved the "position in research" for coala. What I want is a more stable flow of projects. Not single ones here and there but more routinely. Having another thesis thrown into the pool surely is nice but does not help mid- and long term I feel.
For what it's worth, I want to seek contact with universities/institutes/profs we already know (and that already know/like coala) and try to get some kind of pilot project going so we can use that as a way to slowly get more traction.

As a mid-term thing we could for example focus GSoC and similar projects more into the research area and let them write analysis.

I feel like thinking research in time frames of less than ~half a year does not work out because a lot of effort has to go into researching, implementing and evaluating and with no full time development this might be a reasonable timeframe for a community driven thing. One idea would be to gather a group that would be interested to implement the first cool shiny coala analysis. Make it a project for ~3-4 devs and promote it in the community to help with review and evaluation.

[sils]

any specific ideas on the "pilot project"? Sincerely, Lasse Schuirmann lasse@schuirmann.net http://coala.io/ - http://viperdev.io/ - http://gitmate.com/

…

On 15 December 2016 at 23:20, sims1253 ***@***.***> wrote: @sils <https://github.com/sils> I feel like getting coala into research hast to be done kind of long term ish. There were two theses written with coala but I don't feel that this improved the "position in research" for coala. What I want is a more stable flow of projects. Not single ones here and there but more routinely. Having another thesis thrown into the pool surely is nice but does not help mid- and long term I feel. For what it's worth, I want to seek contact with universities/institutes/profs we already know (and that already know/like coala) and try to get some kind of pilot project going so we can use that as a way to slowly get more traction. As a mid-term thing we could for example focus GSoC and similar projects more into the research area and let them write analysis. I feel like thinking research in time frames of less than ~half a year does not work out because a lot of effort has to go into researching, implementing and evaluating and with no full time development this might be a reasonable timeframe for a community driven thing. One idea would be to gather a group that would be interested to implement the first cool shiny coala analysis. Make it a project for ~3-4 devs and promote it in the community to help with review and evaluation. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#7 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFc6KH9zXCsIBg-aCWWbmmwOW3c_L10bks5rIb1DgaJpZM4LJqvh> .

[sims1253]

the one with university people?
The language agnostic compiler optimization thing could be something that's interesting for them and would be huge for us.
Visualization of code also is something that is done in research and could be interesting for us. Generating graphs from code. This is just a small brainstorming. No concrete plans at this stage.

[sils]

any timeframe on the roadmap on this so far?

[sims1253]

rough outline would be
establish contact: January
outline project and thesis ideas: March
First thesis done in this formal process: Dezember