Well, that was a whopper! The Washington, DC area received its first blizzard in many years this past weekend. For a city that normally only receives 15.4 inches of snow spread out over an entire season, the two plus feet of snow has been overwhelming for the city. DC is not equipped to handle this amount of snow. But, we were warned. And, for the most part, the weather forecasters were right on target. All thanks to amazing computer models that predicted the storms path and total accumulation with stellar accuracy 8 days before the storm hit the region. This was highlighted by the Washington Post: This forecast success would […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sebastian Elbaum, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and David S. Rosenblum, Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. Their paper Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty won second place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Uncertainty is present in most systems we build today, whether introduced by human decisions, machine learning algorithms, external libraries, or sensing variability. This uncertainty leads to occasional misbehavior or incorrect output that is deemed to be acceptable. In the […]