This is the prediction market I'm here for: you can now bet on German train delays. Glorious stuff. Peak trolling. bahn.bet

As someone who decided to turn their MPhil into a Ph.D. (and subsequent academic career) I'm strongly in favour of the notion of a Research Masters (whether MRes or MPhil). Agree wholeheartedly - discussion should be about much more than just visa policy. wonkhe.com/blogs/the-mr...

In the UK, services such as TuneIn or RadioGarden no longer broadcast international radio stations. This is prevented by a 2019 copyright infringement suit by Sony and Warner Music. This community-edited list is the closest legal alternative, it's great! www.radio-browser.info

I remember reading about the NavLab (1986) as an undergraduate. Unsurprising that, exactly 40 years later, driverless cars on UK roads are imminent. youtu.be/ntIczNQKfjQ More surprised by the strident assertions about their safety and apparent lack of ethical groundwork. tinyurl.com/38ac7cd5

spectrum.ieee.org/glucose-moni... On the unreliability of continuous glucose monitors, which can become particularly dangerous when used as part of an artificial pancreas loop (where insulin is administered by an algorithm). Good example of a safety critical cyber-physical system.

In the futurementary Terminator, I don't remember Skynet starting off with open-source repositories theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-... (I also strongly suggest following the link to the GitHub PR, because it makes much more sense with that as context).

An interesting list of instances where articles have been retractions because of bugs in the underlying research software: github.com/danielskatz/...

Really interesting link from a colleague: arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/... Shines a light on how different developer attitudes towards LLM usage in software development (provenance and maintainability versus rapid improvements in functionality?) can impact on established communities and projects.

This looks great - the first chapter has me hooked.

Talk about a bug becoming a feature! How the synth track in New Order's Blue Monday started out as a programming accident. (By @jonmattox.bsky.social) www.instagram.com/reel/DRCt5vk...

The Causal Testing Framework (CTF), which enables the use of Causal Inference to test properties in software, is now available on Conda-Forge! anaconda.org/conda-forge/...

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65660-9 New from @rmrahal and colleagues Funder was German Foundation for […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

arXiv is now only publishing CS pre-prints that have been accepted after review. blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a... I think this is a good thing...

📣 ICST 2026: Call for Research Papers! The International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2026 call for research-track submissions. 📅 Important Dates: Abstract Due: Dec 15 Full Paper Due: Dec 22 🔗 Learn More & Submit: conf.researchr.org/track/icst-2...

I used to have one of these! Love the idea of "modding" an old casio watch! 🔧 You can upgrade a Casio watch with Bluetooth, step counting, and games | The Verge share.google/Zma7UEjgKPfp...

Developed a pesky running injury. Not looking forward to working through the suggestions illustrated by ChatGPT, especially the straight leg raise...

New open access book out from our MORPHSS project lead @samuelmoore.org: "By deploying theoretical literature on science & technology studies, care ethics, & the commons, the book critically interrogates open access & reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing." #OA #AHSS

As with the post office Horizon bug, years of institutional coverup and mismanagement after the bug is exposed. This probably causes more damage than the technical bug itself. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An account of what is possibly the first "monkey tester" (or at least when the term originated) - a program to automatically generate random test inputs. Developed in 1983 to test MacWrite and MacPaint! www.folklore.org/Monkey_Lives...

Tandem's t:connect iOS mobile app that controls monitors the t:slim X2 insulin pump and its battery causes a battery depletion and an unexpected pump shut down. #tandem #insulinpump #iOSapp #tconnect #battery #shutdown #hyperglycemia #recall www.instagram.com/p/C-s-U3fxxBg/

I found this very interesting. Could be interesting to consider a variant of this for research paper submissions to Computer Science conferences, where the ballooning review burden is completely unsustainable. Would need to devise different measures to prevent misuse though.

An odd licensing approach - hardly going to make Java the obvious teaching choice for higher education in years to come? www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/j...

AALpy - a very elegant Python library (not by me!) implementing several finite state machine inference algorithms. Includes active and passive approaches, state-merging and observation-table based ones. github.com/DES-Lab/AALpy

Simple visualisations of code "survival" over time: github.com/erikbern/git... Several groups of students have tried this on a variety of OSS projects. Anecdotally it seems that the "half-life" of the code for a given version is remarkably short! Would welcome pointers to studies on this!

Procedures for testing driverless cars (at least the underlying ML) are still effectively in their infancy, so it's interesting that these will be on UK roads so soon. Particularly interested in accountability (moral & legal) when accidents inevitably occur. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Blast from the past: "How Do We Trust Our Science Code?" Most scientific research code is low quality and riddled with bugs, written by people who aren't professional software developers. And we shouldn't expect them to be! (Written eight years ago, Jesus) www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-...

Reminder: I am hiring 1-2 PhD students to research the use of LLMs to augment human-written test suites! Interested? Apply here: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha... Reach out if you have questions! #softwaretesting #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #LLM #AI #PHD

I'm seeking 1-2 Ph.D. students, who will conduct research on how LLMs can extend and augment the software tests created by humans. Please apply, share, and get in touch if you have questions! Apply at: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

Our Causal Testing Framework, part of the EPSRC-funded CITCOM project, has just been published in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social. joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21... Supports testing of "hard-to-test" systems with large input spaces, nondeterminism and long execution times.

I never play computer games these days. But I got to spend a couple of hours playing Enter the Gungeon (enterthegungeon.com) with my son (very much the gamer) , and it's fantastic. Retro and amusing - highly recommend!

Especially short-sighted, given that so many key technologies that underpin the strong growth in the US economy, especially in AI, have emerged from these very research institutions.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... Be cited or perish? I don't recognise some of the worst practices in CS (hope I'm not being naiive!), but concerning nonetheless...

This article claiming "no evidence" that mobile phone restrictions in schools have no impact on social media usage or wellbeing has been widely reported in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... Worth noting the absence of any causal analysis, despite many confounding factors.

Why are universities ending their #Elsevier #OpenAccess agreements? Peter Barr @tweeterbarr.bsky.social explains the reasoning behind these decisions and what it says about the wider academic publishing sector in the UK on @lseimpactblog.bsky.social 👇

Delighted for my Ph.D. student Richard Somers, whose work on using a digital twin (of blood-glucose dynamics in a human) to test artificial pancreas systems for diabetics has just been published in STVR: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Cool and wacky work from Neil Walkinshaw on trying to get a formal solution to the “stopping problem” in random testing. arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17019. This formulation has a bunch of limitations/assumptions, but I really enjoy the framing and line of thought.

A great essay on the subjective nature of probability: www.nature.com/articles/d41... A probability is not an objective property of the world. Pertinent to many Software Engineering contexts. Motivated my recent forays into Subjective Logic (which attempts to make this subjectivity explicit).

Delighted to be co-organising the inaugural CauSE 2025 workshop (Causal Methods in Software Engineering), co-located with FSE in Trondheim. We welcome papers on all things causality and SE! Deadline Feb. 25th. Spread the word! causality-software-engineering.github.io/cause-worksh...

Took on a safety critical systems course this semester. "NORAD's missile warning system: What went wrong" provides an arresting list of near-misses. The accidental introduction of "mass raid" test data into the live system must have been especially frightening! www.gao.gov/assets/masad...