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The professor himself very likely did none of it. My guess is that someone like Dr. Su probably wouldn't even have enough time to work on fuzzing LLVM, and woul
by Cyph0n 10y ago
The professor himself very likely did none of it. My guess is that someone like Dr. Su probably wouldn't even have enough time to work on fuzzing LLVM, and would likely be more concerned with writing up the next proposal to fund his lab :P
From what I've seen in academia, the supervisor typically generates ideas, and the grad students and postdocs test them out and see if they have potential. The discussion goes back and forth until a decision is made on whether or not to pursue an idea.
This differs from group to group of course, and is not the case in smaller groups, but it's generally how things work.
- mhh__ 10y ago[Citation needed]
- Cyph0n 10y agoIt's just anecdotal. Take it with a grain of salt if you're skeptical.
- CyberDildonics 10y agoYou just said it was likely.
- Cyph0n 10y agoBased on my experience, it's likely that he didn't work on it personally. Is there something wrong with a statement like that?
- andrewflnr 10y agoWhere do you expect someone to find statistics to cite regarding the internal workings of university labs? Or are you looking for someone's blog post, which would ultimately also be anecdotal? "[Citation needed]" is just noise when there's no reasonable expectation that the desired evidence actually exists. Moreover, we're not writing Wikipedia here, just trying to have a discussion. Take a chill pill.
- billforsternz 10y agoThere won't be an academic paper supporting this until a senior academic thinks it's a worthy concept for investigation and follows up by asking his postgrads to work the idea up into a publishable paper. Quite meta really.
- pfortuny 10y agoReal life. Mine also.
- PhaseLockk 10y agoI can anecdotally confirm this to be true in my experience as well.
- helloqirun 10y agoI happened to come across here... For this specific case mentioned in your first paragraph, it is not true.
- Cyph0n 10y agoThanks for letting us know! That's quite impressive honestly :)
- mehrdada 10y agoI think this can vary across people/projects and perhaps true in a large number of cases (this could also be said for the management in business, and it is debatable whether spending time on the ground doing the actual thing would always be the most leveraged thing one can do). Irrespective of that debate, at least for this particular instance, I can confirm that the professor in question himself [who happens to have been my doctoral advisor :)] went through a whole lot of trouble personally, down to reducing many many individual bugs and you can just look at the bug tracker activity under his name to independently verify. (I have long graduated so this is not a "paid Glassdoor review" either and ran into this as a frequent HN lurker!)