Alumnus Girish Suryanarayana’s book “Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt” (co-authored by Ganesh Samarthyam and Tushar Sharma; published by Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier; with forewords by Grady Booch and Dr. Stéphane Ducasse) has been released. According to Suryanarayana (Ph.D. 2007; R. Taylor, advisor), this book is a must-read for software developers, designers, and architects who are looking to improve the quality of their design. It includes a collection of 25 structural design smells, and discusses how smells uncover mistakes made while designing, reveals what design principles were overlooked or misapplied, and identifies what principles need to be applied properly to address those smells through refactoring. Organized across common areas of software design, each smell is presented with diagrams and examples illustrating the poor design practices and the problems that result. The book describes how the overall quality of software can be improved significantly and technical debt can be reduced by finding and addressing smells in the design. The book also includes a number of anecdotes based on experiences in real-world projects. 

Prof. Bonnie Nardi gave a keynote address titled “Activity Theory and Imagination: Possible-Worlds Artifacts and Practices” at the 4th Congress of the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research (ISCAR) in October in Sydney, Australia. 

Prof. Alfred Kobsa co-chaired the 8th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2014), held October 6-10 in the Silicon Valley’s Foster City. This conference is the premier international forum for presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems. 

ISR Director Richard N. Taylor has been awarded $199,960 by the National Science Foundation for his research on "EAGER: Accountability Through Architecture for Decentralized Systems".