Meeting schedule

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Meetings are generally open to interested visitors. We are in 360 Hearst Mining (“the BiD Lab“). Meetings are brown bag—you’re welcome to bring your lunch.

Fall 2024 meetings

The Fall 2024 meeting schedule is here.

Spring 2024 meetings

The Spring 2024 meeting schedule is here.

Spring 2023 meetings (in person)

  • Feb 3: new faces, project updates
  • Feb 17: SIGCSE demo/talk dry runs #1
    • Karim El-Refai and Daewon Kwon, Twincode pair programming framework
  • March 3: SIGCSE demo/talk dry runs #2
    • Fuzail Shakir: The effect of “flextension” policies on CS students’ self-efficacy and performance
  • March 17: no meeting (SIGCSE 2023)
  • March 31: no meeting (Spring Break)
  • April 14: Fuzail Shakir [missed]
  • April 21: Victor Huang, Fuzail Shakir, announcements from soon-to-be-alumni of ACELab
  • April 28: Eliane Wiese, University of Utah: Human-centered design meets CS education
    (Zoom link) How can we integrate ethics into technical courses in a meaningful and productive way? How can we help CS students write code that is more readable to other humans? What do these questions have to do with each other? I will present key principles of research on learning, and discuss how they relate to typical human factors research. I will present structure choices (patterns) that I found to be common in student code that affect a program’s readability and maintainability, and, in some cases, may also indicate shallow understanding of computing concepts. I will also present a second line of work on ethics. Ethics problems with tech are easy to find on the front pages of newspapers, resulting in calls to integrate ethics across the CS curriculum. But the topics in undergrad courses are far removed from the issues in the headlines. Even in AI, students are learning about A* search, not about making self-driving cars safer. I will present an instructional design approach that integrates ethics with this type of low-level technical content, show how the inclusion of ethics can deepen technical learning. After the talk, Eliane will be available for continued discussion (via Zoom) 1-on-1 or in small groups. A signup schedule will be posted here shortly. Bio: Eliane Wiese is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley, advised by Dr. Marcia Linn (with bonus mentorship from Dr. Armando Fox). Dr. Wiese earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where she was advised by Dr. Ken Koedinger and awarded an Institute of Education Sciences fellowship. As an undergrad at Columbia, she combined a major in computer science and teacher training. Dr. Wiese uses approaches from human-computer interaction and educational psychology to design new systems to support students in learning computer science, and in particular to consider the impact that technology has on other humans.

Summer 2022 meetings (Zoom link), every other Monday at noon Pacific time

2022-06-27 Summer checkin, who’s who

Who is new to the group/looking for projects, who’s working on what, set schedule for rest of summer

2022-07-11 Aslı Akalin

Aslı will present highlights of results from the experiments about potential gender bias in pair programming conducted at UC Berkeley and the University of Seville, Spain. Paper to appear in ESEM 2022 (Intl. Conf. on Empirical Software Engineering & Measurement). Undergrads Karim El-Refai and Daewon Kwon (rising sophomores) have been heavily involved in this work recently and we’re looking for ideas for future work directions too.

2022-07-25 SIGCSE 2023 plans (full-paper abstracts 12 Aug, deadline 19 Aug; posters/demos have later deadlines)

  • Armando will talk briefly about the ACELab website, and give a few highlights from ITiCSE 2022
  • Victor Huang has been CS375 GSI with Armando twice (Fall 22 will be 3rd time) and has run Summer CS375 “boot camp” for years. Victor and Armando are looking at reporting on CS375 for SIGCSE. Victor will present some possible threads/ideas around which to structure the paper; we’re looking for feedback on the topics/organization.
  • [others – add your SIGCSE submission plans here – specify if paper, poster, demo, etc]

2022-08-08 TBD

2022-08-22 TBD

Spring 2022 meetings

2022-04-01  Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, The Pushback Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age in Code Review (host: Armando Fox)

Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill is a Staff Research Scientist with Product Inclusion at Google, leading an effort on improving diversity and inclusion for software developers. Before Google, he was an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University. His research spans human-computer interaction and software engineering, and has been awarded five ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, an NSF CAREER Award, a VL/HCC Best Paper Award, and a Microsoft Software Engineering Innovation Foundation award.
Talk title: The Pushback Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age in Code Review (full paper)
Code review is a common practice in software organizations, where software engineers give each other feedback about a code change. As in other human decision-making processes, code review is susceptible to human biases, where reviewers’ feedback to the author may depend on how reviewers perceive the author’s demographic identity, whether consciously or unconsciously. Through the lens of role congruity theory, we show that the amount of pushback that code authors receive varies based on their gender, race/ethnicity, and age. Furthermore, we estimate that such pushback costs Google more than 1000 extra engineer hours every day, or about 4% of the estimated time engineers spend responding to reviewer comments, a cost borne by non-White and non-male engineers. Zoom recording link passcode: Yc7y$r%=

2022-04-15  Prof. Niema Moshiri, Ensuring exam integrity with MESS (Moshiri Exam Similarity Score) (host: Lisa Yan)

Guest Speaker: Prof. (Alexander) Niema Moshiri is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He works on computational biology, with a research focus on viral phylogenetics and epidemiology. He also place a heavy emphasis on teaching, namely on the development of online educational content, primarily Massive Adaptive Interactive Texts (MAITs), and recently gave a TEDx talk on the subject.
Talk topic:  Ensuring exam integrity with MESS (Moshiri Exam Similarity Score)

2022-04-29 SCPBL (“Skippable”): Integrating Faded Parsons Problems into CS61A (Profs. Pamela Fox, Michael Ball)

Talk topic: SCPBL (“Skippable”): Integrating Faded Parsons Problems into CS61A