The DARPA Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves (MUSE) program seeks to make significant advances in the way software is built, debugged, verified, maintained, and understood.  Central to its approach is the creation of a community infrastructure built around a large, diverse, and evolving corpus of software drawn from the hundreds of billions of lines of open source code available today.

The Second Workshop on Computing within LIMITS was held at UCI on June 9-10.  Among the organizers of the workshop were ISR faculty members Debra Richardson and myself, Professor Bonnie Nardi.  The objective of this series of workshops is to foster discussion on the impact of present and future ecological, material, energetic, and/or societal limits on computing. These topics are seldom discussed in contemporary computing research.  A goal is to foster concrete research that innovates on technologies, techniques, and contexts for computing within fundamental physical planetary limits.

The Schools of ICS and Engineering recently held two exciting alumni events providing a great opportunity for ISR faculty and alumni to reconnect, network, and establish new relationships.

Many students have an active interest in playing computer games on a variety of different devices. Some students want to transform their interest in game play to game design or game making. Many games employ game mechanics and software development kits (SDKs) that are designed to encourage or embrace game making or modding. While making and modding are important modalities for learning about game design, they primarily rely on informal game design practices and observational learning (e.g., watching online tutorial videos). Such learning modality may be effective, but may also be ad hoc, difficult to systematize and assess, and thus often inefficient or ineffective.