Where My Grad Students Are

I’ve been blogging about undergrad projects pretty regularly, but not about the progress my graduate students have been making. In brief:

• Samira is using Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to group events in a project's history (email messages, ticket changes, repository check-ins, etc.) into larger-scale events so that they'll be easier for people to understand. Having tested her ideas on DrProject in the winter, she's now applying them to data from SourceForge; we hope to have preliminary results posted soon.
• Carolyn's aim is to see if some results from mathematics education research apply to computer science. More specifically, studies have shown that there are patterns in the mistakes people make when learning to do arithmetic or prove theorems—for example, when children are learning to add multi-digit numbers, they often add the carry back into the same column, rather than the column to the left. Knowing that, teachers can watch for the symptoms, and then target their teaching to fix the root misunderstanding. Carolyn is gearing up to do a study of CS undergrads to find out if there are also patterns in the mistakes they make using model checking tools like SPIN. If so, we might be able to design tools that make those kinds of errors less likely.
• Jeremy has been building tools to help developers find information in projects and stay aware of what their colleagues are doing. He's ready to start talking to people about field trials—basically, he'd like to talk to a handful of development teams to find out what they're using right now, give them his tools, and see if they make the developers' lives better. If you're in the Greater Toronto Area, and would be willing to chat to him, please get in touch with him or me.