The pivotal role of software in our modern world imposes strong requirements on quality, correctness, and reliability of software systems. The ability to understand program code plays a key role for programmers to fulfill these requirements. Despite significant progress, research on program comprehension has had a fundamental limitation: program comprehension is a cognitive process that cannot be directly observed, which leaves considerable room for (mis)interpretation, uncertainty, and confounding factors. Thus, central questions such as “What makes a good programmer?” and “How should we program?” are surprisingly difficult to answer based on the state of the art.
Recently, researchers began to lift research on program comprehension to a new level. The key idea is to leverage recent methods from cognitive neuroscience to obtain insights into the cognitive processes involved in program comprehension. Opening the “black box” of human cognition will lead to a breakthrough in understanding the why and how of program comprehension and to a completely new perspective and methodology of measuring program comprehension, with direct implications for programming methodology, language design, and education.
In this seminar, we will review and discuss the past, current, and future developments in this area.
Registration
Registration for the seminar is mandatory. To distribute students among the available seminars offered by the computer science department, you have to select your preferences for a seminar or a proseminar on the central registration platform for seminars and will be automatically assigned to a seminar according to your preferences.
If you are assigned to this seminar, for organizational reasons, you have to sign up both in the course registration form that will be given above and in the LSF (seminar, proseminar). Deadlines for the LSF (HISPOS) registration will be posted in the LSF (HISPOS) portal. Registration is possible up to three weeks after the topic assignment / kick-off.
In this seminar, each participant has to perform a literature search and propose an experiment for the given topic.
Subsequently, the topic, the results of the literature search, and the proposed experiment have to be incorporated into a presentation and a written thesis.
To aid the literature search, the experiment proposal, and the presentation, this seminar includes multiple preparatory sessions at the beginning of the semester.
The student presentations will be held in June and July 2022.
All sessions will take place on-site at the university (under the caveat that the pandemic situation admits in-person sessions) on Thursdays 12:15 PM - 2:00 PM.
Participation to all sessions is mandatory.
The topic assignment will take place on Thursday April 21, at 12:15 PM. Further information will be provided via e-mail after registration.
Literature
The following book is mandatory to read for this course:
- R. Poldrack. The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about our Thoughts. Princeton University Press, 2018.
The following papers and topics are available in this course:
