Some people think that PhD students should limit their interests to their particular thesis topic. I think that such thing is rather harmful, and instead advisors should encourage curiosity (of course, well disciplined) and research scientist. Skill such as leadership and group work need to be developed and PhD students need to be independent and find their own way.
My Research interest are centered in search-based software engineering for testing and validation problems, model driven engineering for adaptive systems, the modeling of systems at runtime, and the use of different techniques to validate these system. I'm also interested in empirical studies of different nature, and empirical validation in computer science.

Some people believe that it is important to classify and rank scientific publications. Is such their spirit that they have published a ranking of international conferences and journal, which is used in many institutions to evaluate scientists. Such evaluation range from A+ (super duper conference), A (very good conference) to L. Workshops and internal reports are notably not ranked.