Question about the new course COM 3362: Advanced Object-Oriented Systems
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Will the course be run in the style of a graduate
seminar or will it be similar to COM 3360?  Although I enjoyed
COM 3360 and got a lot out of it, I found the tests to be stressful,
particularly on my short term memory.  On the other hand I would like
to get more into the work done by the Demeter group, and see how to 
possibly extend some of it into the database area.
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Answer:

The course will be run in the style of a graduate seminar.
The first time the course was offered, no exam was given and the average
grade was very close to a perfect A. At the same time, the students
got a lot of work done which continues to live on, for example

in the form of design patterns for adaptive programming.

in the form of the Isthmus project which was polished by Salil Pradhan
as a part of the COM 3399 requirements.

in the form of a CORBA project which we used later in a research proposal
to the government.

in the form of additions to my book, see: exercise 15.17, page 492
  contributed by Michael Werner.

The requirements for the course will be geared to your interests.
A questionnaire will be handed out at the beginning of the course.

The requirement for the course is a paper which describes some
improvement of the ``state-of-the-art'' in the form of ``original'' research
and/or an implementation. The idea is to produce a new and interesting
combination of something you learned or will learn about OOT.

The course is geared towards both practitioners who want to learn
about the latest state-of-the-art to help them in their software
development work _and_ towards Ph.D. students who want to advance
the state-of-the-art.

For Ph.D. students who choose to write a paper, 
the paper should be publishable in a good conference 
(subject to some English editing, if needed, for students whose mother
tongue is not English).

The course COM 3362 offers an exciting opportunity to participate in 
the research activities of the Adaptive Software Laboratory, also known
as the Demeter Research Group. Next quarter,
Professor Jens Palsberg from MIT and Northeastern will be working with us 
and this will lead to interesting material which might be presented in COM 3362.
I will also ask Professor Palsberg to give a guest lecture on type systems
and type inferencing for object-oriented programming languages.

More information about the course, e.g. a course syllabus,
is accessible through my home page.

-- Karl L.