Title: Empowering Software Engineering with Eye Tracking
Speaker: Bonita Sharif, PhD
Date: Friday, January 22, 2021
Time: 11:00 am
Location: Zoom Meeting
Abstract:
Eye tracking has been used since the 1800's for various tasks in psychological research. An eye tracker provides information about exactly what a person is looking at while they are performing a task. This information is invaluable for researchers, practitioners, and educators. Educators can visually understand the thought processes that go into reading and comprehending source code. This helps devise better intervention strategies, for example. Software engineering researchers can better understand how developers work while fixing a bug or adding a feature and use this information to improve methods and tools that address such tasks. User interface researchers can test different designs in different contexts. Practitioners can become more aware of their working habits. The presentation will describe eye tracking technology and the problems faced by software engineering researchers. Results of several eye tracking studies related to program comprehension will also be presented. Additionally, iTrace, an eye-tracking infrastructure that implicitly embeds eye tracking into the developer work environment is described thereby enabling eye tracking empirical studies to be conducted on large software systems. Lastly, a discussion on how these results support a broader community of researchers, practitioners, and educators is presented.
Bio:
Bonita Sharif, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Nebraska USA. She received her Ph.D. in 2010 and MS in 2003 in Computer Science from Kent State University, U.S.A and B.S. in Computer Science from Cyprus College, Nicosia Cyprus. Her research interests are in eye tracking related to software engineering, empirical software engineering, program comprehension, emotional awareness, software traceability, and software visualization to support maintenance of large systems. She serves on numerous program committees including ICSE, ESEC/FSE, MSR, ASE, ICSME, VISSOFT, SANER, and ICPC. She served as general chair of VISSOFT 2016 and ETRA 2018 and 2019. She served as program chair for ICSME 2019 late breaking track and is serving as the diversity co-chair for the ESEC/FSE 2021 conference. Sharif is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the NSF CRI award related to empowering software engineering with eye tracking. She also received the NCWIT Undergraduate Student Mentoring award in 2016. She directs the Software Engineering Research and Empirical Studies Lab in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UNL.
Twitter: @shbonita
