I finally finished the course requirements for my PhD. Now it is all research. I spent April and May reporting my research findings from last year.

I am now looking for a new research direction. Here are what I've been considering:
-Collaborative software engineering: My original interest in software engineering. I believe that there are simple collaboration rules/patterns that determine a successful software project.
-Performance/Load testing: A lot of the data mining techniques I've been learning in the past can be applied in this field. Although I feel there maybe a lot of work in this field already. A few colleague of mine in SAIL have already successfully exploring the applications of these techniques.
-Cost/Utility Analysis: There is a paper from Boehm and Sullivan in COFES2000 saying that although cost have been studied in the past, not many people look at the utility of software production.

I am also attending the MSR summer school 2010 at Queens: msrcanada.org. It is a great opportunity to learn from experts in the fields such as Ahmed Hassan, Daniel German, Michael Godfrey, Thomas Zimmermann, Tim Menzies, Audris Mockus, Tao Xie, and etc. It is a good opportunity to learn new statistical and data mining technique for your project and share research ideas and results with your fellow students.