Courses

Software Engineering Research in the Neuroage Prof. Dr. Sven Apel, Dr. Norman Peitek Seminar/Proseminar — Summer Semester 2023

News

31.05.2023

Presentation Schedule and Upcoming Deadline

Dear students,

 

we have uploaded the presentation schedule (see "Presentation Schedule" under Materials). Keep in mind that attendance is mandatory for all sessions, including the ones in which you are not presenting.

We have opened the submissions for a... Read more

Dear students,

 

we have uploaded the presentation schedule (see "Presentation Schedule" under Materials). Keep in mind that attendance is mandatory for all sessions, including the ones in which you are not presenting.

We have opened the submissions for a "draft" of your presentation slides. The deadline is 15th of June for everyone, even if your presentation is not until July. This first submission should contain a decently developed presentation that contains a complete outline and content of your talk. You are allowed to make refinements until the actual talk (e.g., adding additional images, rephrasing text, alignment, ...). In fact, we encourage you to get feedback from your advisor on the slides. But the draft submission must already be sufficiently developed!

Please ask your advisor if you have further questions.

 

Best,

SERitN-Team
10.05.2023

Guidelines for the Presentation

Dear students,

 

we have updated the organizational slides (see Materials) with a new slide 5 that contains some guidelines on the structure of your presentation. It should contain all three elements: a summary of your assigned paper, brief related work, and... Read more

Dear students,

 

we have updated the organizational slides (see Materials) with a new slide 5 that contains some guidelines on the structure of your presentation. It should contain all three elements: a summary of your assigned paper, brief related work, and your own experiment idea.

Please ask your advisor if you have further questions!

 

Best,

SERitN-Team
20.04.2023

Topic Assignment is online

Please check the material section for the topic assignment and contact your advisor if you need any help.
 

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. 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 2023.
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 20, 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 Code Review Biases Biases and Differences in Code Review using Medical Imaging and Eye-Tracking: Genders, Humans, and Machines
09 Complexity Metrics Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study
10 Functional Connectivity Connecting the Dots: Rethinking the Relationship Between Code and Prose Writing with Functional Connectivity
11 Cognitive Load of Code Comprehension The Effect of Poor Source Code Lexicon and Readability on Developers’ Cognitive Load
12 Cognition & Novices Relating Reading, Visualization, and Coding for New Programmers: A Neuroimaging Study
13 Replication Study without fMRI A Replication Study on Code Comprehension and Expertise using Lightweight Biometric Sensors
14 EEG & Programming Towards an Affordable Brain Computer Interface for the Assessment of Programmers’ Mental Workload
15 EEG & Programmer Expertise Correlates of Programmer Efficacy and their Link to Experience: A Combined EEG and Eye-Tracking Study

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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