Research by Philip Greenspun

Site Home : Research

New Ideas

• Solar Magnitude Forum, a way of improving online communities (master's thesis)
• Mobile Phone as Home Computer (would keep a whole group busy)
• not truly new (from 2003): a Fantasy Computer Science Research Lab

Old Ideas

• formal specification of Web services and automatic generation of the code for the data model and user experience (i.e., computer programs writing reliable computer programs instead of human beings writing unreliable computer programs); see Problem Set 4 for an example.
• use of off-the-shelf natural language processing tools to personalize Web experience, basically comparing each new item on a Web service to every item about which the user has previously expressed an opinion
• means of making a Web session sharable and mobile at the service level so that users can pick up where they left off after surfing a site or ask their friends to look over their shoulder, without resorting to client-to-client or JavaScript kludges
• collaborative exchange and collaborative development of data models. The basic idea of data model exchange is that two computer systems ought to be able to exchange their machine-readable data without too much human intervention. The basic idea of collaborative data model development is that by giving each user the tools to extend a Web-based service it ought to be possible to quickly discern the best data model for a large number of users. This is described to some extent in Chapter 17 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing.
• development of a high-quality open-source comprehensive suite of software to support collaborative Web applications, reducing what is currently a custom programming challenge to a simple matter of configuration. See this book chapter on building scalable systems for on-line communities for a flavor of the problem and the solution circa 1998.

  off the wall stuff

• formalizing photographic aesthetics

Quotes

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Ancient History

the Web

• Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• We have chosen shame and will get war. The tragedy and promise of HTML.
• When Computers Wake You Up at Night -- Monitoring, Reminding, and Education
• Extending the World Wide Web for Writing and Viewing Collaborative Hypermedia. This was presented in the Collaborative Hypermedia Systems workshop at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work '94 conference (ACM) in Chapel Hill, NC in October.

  computers and society

• The Year 2000 Bug (because people keep asking)
• Software Pricing -- should software really be sold like tables and chairs?

  computers and law

• Making the Internet Safe for the Courts (or the Courts safe for the Internet) my Quixotic scheme for making litigation more open to the public and more efficient for the participants
• Computer-Aided Law? An examination of three PhD theses (sorry about the missing figure)

  miscellaneous

• SITE CONTROLLER: A system for computer-aided civil engineering and construction or "Can a Lisp Machine run a bulldozer?"
  • PDF
  • PostScript (old school!)
  (MIT A.I. Lab Technical Report 1408 and my S.M. thesis)
• Suicide at MIT: Is it a Poisson process? (also a PDF file)

Useful Internet Computer Science Resources

• resources for Computer Science students