rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (06/11/91)
Richard D. Schlichting (rick@cs.arizona.edu)
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 86721, USA
[This report represents the personal opinion of the author, who was on
sabbatical in Japan from Dec. 1989 through July 1990. The sabbatical
was supported in part by grant INT-8910818 from the NSF U.S.-Japan
Cooperative Science Program.]
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I arrived at the Toyonaka campus of Osaka University at about
7:00p on May 15. As soon as I got out of the taxi at the main
gate the guards knew who I was, as they had obviously been forewarned
to look out for a foreign visitor. They then phoned my host, Prof.
Tohru Kikuno, who came to pick me up and take me to my on-campus
accomodations for the night.
The next morning, Kikuno met me at my room and we headed out
to his laboratory, which is headed by Prof. Koji Torii, a quite
well-known expert in the area of software engineering. There I
met Torii and we all chatted for awhile about Japan and computer
science in general.
Following our conversations, he took me into another room to
hear a couple of presentations. The first, by a research associate
in the lab, was on the Ginger data collection and analysis system,
which is now a couple of years old. The thrust of this system is to
collect information on code size and changes throughout the development
of a program, and then to use this data to provide feedback to programmers
during development. A prototype system has been written in C, and its
usefulness tested during an experiment involving various teams of university
students. The results seem to support their hypothesis of the usefulness of
this information. Interestingly enough, subsequent internal use of
Ginger has been only to collect data, and not to provide feedback.
The second presentation was on Square, which is a system that
attempts to use heuristics to develop project development plans
similar to those developed by human managers. They have experimented
with two heuristics, with the second one giving results similar to
those obtained from the use of a human project manager. The overall goal,
which is in keeping with Torii's general research thrust, is to improve
the general level of software quality by investigation of high-level
design processes.
Following lunch and my talk on Psync, we adjourned again to Torii's
office for general discussion. While we were talking, Prof. Kozo Kinoshita,
who I have known for a number of years because of his work in fault-tolerance,
stopped by to chat. He moved from Hiroshima University to Osaka Univ.
about a year ago and is now in the Department of Applied Physics. Moving
universities is relatively unusual in Japanese academia, but this particular
move was not since Koza received his degree Osaka University. In fact,
he and Torii actually graduated from the same lab at Osaka University, with
Kozo being a couple of years ahead.
At about 5pm or so, it came time to head to Kyoto for my next day's
appointment. Dr. Kazuo Sugihara, a former student of Kikuno's who is
now a faculty member at the University of Hawaii, was going to Nagoya to
visit friends, to we decided to travel together on the Shinkansen as far
as Kyoto (we both got a chuckle out of the fact that he--the Japanese--was
travelling on a Japan Rail Pass, whereas I--the foreigner--was ineligible
due to my visa status.) We had an interesting talk about the differences
between the U.S. and Japanese educational systems on the way. For example,
he tended to agree with the common assessment that Japanese undergraduates
do not work as hard as American undergraduates, although he did indicate
the situation was more comparable at the graduate school level.
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Prof. Koji Torii
Dept. of Information and Computer Sciences
Faculty of Engineering Science
Osaka University
Machikaneyama 1-1, Toyonaka City
Osaka 560, Japan
Prof. Tohru Kikuno
Dept. of Information and Computer Sciences
Faculty of Engineering Science
Osaka University
Machikaneyama 1-1, Toyonaka City
Osaka 560, Japan