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21.10.2022	Grades and Evaluation Online Dear student, We have entered the grades for the seminar 'Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage' in the LSF. Moreover, we have also uploaded the evaluation results for this seminar on the CMS. Thank you for participating and providing... Read more Dear student, We have entered the grades for the seminar 'Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage' in the LSF. Moreover, we have also uploaded the evaluation results for this seminar on the CMS. Thank you for participating and providing feedback! The results were overall positive and we give our best to further improve our seminar courses. We would also like inform you about our upcoming course on Empirical Software Engineering Research, in which we go in-depth on how to conduct empirical studies in a software engineering context. If you liked the topic of this seminar, the course should be interesting for you. It will be a one-week block course in March 2023. More information are available here: https://cms.sic.saarland/empse_ws_2223/
30.06.2022	Online Evaluation Hey, To assess our current quality and improve the quality for future seminars, we are offering an online evaluation that takes about 5-10 minutes. Because of the low number of participants, we would be really glad if every participant would take the time to... Read more Hey, To assess our current quality and improve the quality for future seminars, we are offering an online evaluation that takes about 5-10 minutes. Because of the low number of participants, we would be really glad if every participant would take the time to provide us some feedback by participating in the evaluation. We would be really grateful if we could get not only feedback on our seminar, but also more detailed comments. You can find the link to the evaluation on your personal status page. The evaluation link is valid from now until 07.07.2022. Thank you in advance!
30.06.2022	EEG Study next month at the SE-Chair Hello, we are happy to invite you to our next EEG study. You will have the opportunity to participate in current research and the chance to see an EEG and an eye tracker live (and earn 10€ ). The study will take about 2 hours and will take place at the... Read more Hello, we are happy to invite you to our next EEG study. You will have the opportunity to participate in current research and the chance to see an EEG and an eye tracker live (and earn 10€ ). The study will take about 2 hours and will take place at the Chair of Software Engineering (E1.1). You can book an appointment directly here: https://calendly.com/programcomprehensionstudy/2h You can find the Flyer at the Materials.
21.06.2022	Information for your Presentation Hey, In the following, we provide some additional information regarding your presentation: As all other presentations, the presentations take place in the SR 2.06 in the E1 1 building. You can use your own laptop for the presentation. However, the SR... Read more Hey, In the following, we provide some additional information regarding your presentation: As all other presentations, the presentations take place in the SR 2.06 in the E1 1 building. You can use your own laptop for the presentation. However, the SR 2.06 does only support HDMI. So please acquire an adapter (if necessary) and try it out. The projector is capable of displaying slides in the aspect ratio of 16:9 (4:3 also works). Alternatively, you can also use my laptop along with a presenter. In this case, please let me know until the day of your presentation via e-mail. At the day of your presentation, you have to submit your final presentation as PDF in the CMS. Please do this already in the morning; in the case that your laptop shouldn't work, we can easily download your presentation and use a laptop from the chair, instead.
10.06.2022	Schedule for Presentations is online! We will have three sessions for presentations from 23-th of June until 14-th of July 2022. Please have a look at the materials regarding the schedule for your presentations and see when your presentation is scheduled. Please make sure that your presentation will... Read more We will have three sessions for presentations from 23-th of June until 14-th of July 2022. Please have a look at the materials regarding the schedule for your presentations and see when your presentation is scheduled. Please make sure that your presentation will last 20 minutes. After the presentation, there will be 10 minutes of discussion. Attendance is mandatory for all participants for all presentations (i.e., for all sessions) on site (seminar room 2.06 in the building E1 1)! Since you have already submitted the presentation draft, you will receive feedback to your slides and experiment idea from your advisor. We recommend to arrange a meeting with your advisor. The final version of your slides also has to be submitted after your presentation has taken place -- the version of the slides you will have used in your presentation. There is a separate entry for the submission of the final slides in the CMS (make sure to upload them to the correct session). We can also provide a presenter if needed. In this case, please ask for one before the presentation. In case of questions, please contact your advisor.
20.04.2022	Further information regarding the first meeting (tomorrow) Hey, Thank you for voting for presence/online and for your favourite topics. We took it into account. The topic assignment will be done tomorrow in the kick-off meeting. The kick-off meeting will take place in presence (SR 206, E1 1) and online via MS Teams... Read more Hey, Thank you for voting for presence/online and for your favourite topics. We took it into account. The topic assignment will be done tomorrow in the kick-off meeting. The kick-off meeting will take place in presence (SR 206, E1 1) and online via MS Teams [1] at the same time. For those who voted to joining in presence: we recommend to wear a face mask. See you tomorrow! [1] Visible on your personal status page on the CMS

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Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage

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:

	Topic	Paper
01	Seminal fMRI Study on Program Comprehension	Understanding Understanding Source Code with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
02	Top-Down Comprehension	Measuring Neural Efficiency of Program Comprehension
03	Code Comprehension & Code Review	Decoding the Representation of Code in the Brain: An fMRI Study of Code Review and Expertise
04	Data Structure Manipulation	Distilling Neural Representations of Data Structure Manipulation Using fMRI and fNIRS
05	Bug Detection	The Role of the Insula in Intuitive Expert Bug Detection in Computer Code: An fMRI Study
06	Writing Prose vs. Writing Code	Neurological Divide: An fMRI Study of Prose and Code Writing
07	Expert Programmers	Expert Programmers Have Fine-Tuned Cortical Representations of Source Code
08	Brain Areas & Code Comprehension	Comprehension of Computer Code Relies Primarily on Domain-General Executive Resources
09	Brain Areas & Code Comprehension	Computer Code Comprehension Shares Neural Resources with Formal Logical Inference in the Fronto- Parietal Network
10	Code Review Biases	Biases and Differences in Code Review using Medical Imaging and Eye-Tracking: Genders, Humans, and Machines
11	Complexity Metrics	Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study
12	Combining fMRI & Eye Tracking	Simultaneous Measurement of Program Comprehension with fMRI and Eye Tracking: A Case Study
13	Cognitive Load of Code Comprehension	The Effect of Poor Source Code Lexicon and Readability on Developers’ Cognitive Load
14	Programmer Classification	Mining Biometric Data to Predict Programmer Expertise and Task Difficulty. Cluster Computing
15	Replication Study without fMRI	A Replication Study on Code Comprehension and Expertise using Lightweight Biometric Sensors
16	EEG	Towards an Affordable Brain Computer Interface for the Assessment of Programmers’ Mental Workload

Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage Prof. Dr. Sven Apel Seminar/Proseminar — Summer Semester 2022

News

Grades and Evaluation Online

Online Evaluation

EEG Study next month at the SE-Chair

Information for your Presentation

Schedule for Presentations is online!

Further information regarding the first meeting (tomorrow)

Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage

Registration

Literature