Informatics Seminar on Friday, July 18th at 11.00 - Prem Devanbu

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Prem Devanbu

SPEAKER: Prem Devanbu, University of California at Davis, USA

DATE: Friday, July 18th, 2008

PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)

TIME: 11.00

ABSTRACT:

Commercial software project managers design project organizational structure carefully, mindful of available skills, division of labour, geographical boundaries, etc.  These "cathedrals" are to be contrasted with the "bazaar-like" nature of Open Source Software (OSS) Projects, which have no mandated organizational structure.  Any structure that exists is dynamic, self-organizing, latent, and not necessarily explicitly stated.  However, because of the size and complexity of some OSS projects, we expect that sub-communities will form organically within these project teams, suggesting that within the "bazaar", some sorts of small cathedrals will spontaneously emerge.  Building on advances by statistical physics researchers in detecting community structure in complex networks, we extract and evaluate latent subcommunities from within the email social network of several projects, including Apache HTTPD, Python, PostgresSQL, Perl, and Apache ANT.  We show that these a) subcommunities do exist b) theyare statistically significant c) they are more pronounced in discussions concerning artifacts than in other discussions (e.g., process, personnel etc) d) they are significantly related to collaborative technical behaviour (commits).

BIO:

Prem Devanbu is Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis, he joined UC Davis after almost 20 years in Industry, including 17 years at AT&T Bell Labs and its various offshoots. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Chennai,  India, and his M.S., and Ph.D from Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ.