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Seminar Grades

Written on 07.05.20 by Thomas Bock

The grades for the seminar are now available on the LSF/HISPOS system.

Final Paper Submission on March 31

Written on 17.03.20 by Thomas Bock

Information regarding your final submission in the current situation of Corona virus and closure of the university:

As the submission of your seminar paper has to be done electronically via file upload to the CMS and also all the materials, literature, etc. are available online, still, your final… Read more

Information regarding your final submission in the current situation of Corona virus and closure of the university:

As the submission of your seminar paper has to be done electronically via file upload to the CMS and also all the materials, literature, etc. are available online, still, your final seminar paper has to be submitted to the CMS by March 31, 23:59 CEST.

If your personal working capacity is severely limited due to Corona virus, please let us know beforehand. Then we will try to find a case-by-case solution.

Schedule for Presentations is online!

Written on 18.11.19 by Thomas Bock

We will have five sessions for presentations at the predefined timeslots in January and the beginning of February 2020. Please have a look at schedule for your presentations and see when your presentation is scheduled.

Attendance is mandatory for all participants for all presentations (i.e., for… Read more

Attendance is mandatory for all participants for all presentations (i.e., for all sessions)!

One week before your individual presentation, you have to submit a first draft of your presentation slides to the CMS. You have to upload the draft of the slides to the session your presentation is scheduled to (e.g., if your presentation is scheduled to Session 1, please upload your draft to Session 1, not to any other session!) Afterwards, you will receive feedback to your slides from your advisor (after draft submission but before your actual presentation). We recommend to arrange a meeting with your advisor.

The final version of your slides also has to be submitted right before or 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 (again, make sure to upload them to the correct session).

In case of questions, please contact your advisor.

About the Seminar

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 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.

Kick-off and topic assignment will take place on October 24, at 12:15 in E1 1 room 206.

Literature

R. Poldrack. The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about our Thoughts. Princeton University Press, 2018.
J. Siegmund, C. Kästner, S. Apel, C. Parnin, A. Bethmann, T. Leich, G. Saake, and A. Brechmann. Understanding Understanding Source Code with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 378–389. ACM, 2014.
J. Siegmund, N. Peitek, C. Parnin, S. Apel, J. Hofmeister, C. Kästner, A. Begel, A. Bethmann, and A. Brechmann. Measuring Neural Efficiency of Program Comprehension. In Proc. Europ. Software Engineering Conf./Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), pages 140–150. ACM, 2017.
N. Peitek, J. Siegmund, S. Apel, C. Kästner, C. Parnin, A. Bethmann, T. Leich, G. Saake, and A. Brechmann. A Look into Programmers’ Heads. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2018. Online first.
N. Peitek, J. Siegmund, C. Parnin, S. Apel, A. Brechmann. Beyond Gaze: Preliminary Analysis of Pupil Dilation and Blink Rates in an fMRI Study of Program Comprehension. In Proc. Int. Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP), page 4:1–4:5. ACM, 2018.
N. Peitek, J. Siegmund, C. Parnin, S. Apel, J. Hofmeister, and A. Brechmann. Simultaneous Measurement of Program Comprehension with fMRI and Eye Tracking: A Case Study. In Proc. Int. Symp. Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), page 24:1–24:10. ACM, 2018.
J. Duraes, H. Madeira, J. Castelhano, C. Duarte, and M. C. Branco. WAP: Understanding the Brain at Software Debugging. In Proc. Int. Symposium Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), pages 87–92. IEEE, 2016.
B. Floyd, T. Santander, and W. Weimer. Decoding the Representation of Code in the Brain: An fMRI Study of Code Review and Expertise. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 175–186. IEEE, 2017.
Y. Huang, X. Liu, R. Krueger, T. Santander, X. Hu, K. Leach, T. Santander, and W. Weimer. Distilling Neural Representations of Data Structure Manipulation using fMRI and fNIRS. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 2019.
S. Fakhoury, Y. Ma, V. Arnaoudova, and O. Adesope. The Effect of Poor Source Code Lexicon and Readability on Developers’ Cognitive Load. In Proc. Int. Conf. Program Comprehension (ICPC), pages 286–296. ACM, 2018.
T. Nakagawa, Y. Kamei, H. Uwano, A. Monden, K. Matsumoto, and D. M. German. Quantifying Programmers’ Mental Workload During Program Comprehension Based on Cerebral Blood Flow Measurement: A Controlled Experiment. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 448–451. ACM, 2014.
Y. Ikutani and H. Uwano. Brain Activity Measurement during Program Comprehension with NIRS. In Proc. Int. Conf. Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing (SNPD), pages 1–6. IEEE, 2014.
M. Kosti, K. Georgiadis, D. Adamos, N. Laskaris, D. Spinellis, and L. Angelis. Towards an Affordable Brain Computer Interface for the Assessment of Programmers’ Mental Workload. J. Human–Computer Studies, 115:52–66, 2018.
S. Lee, D. Hooshyar, H. Ji, K. Nam, and H. Lim. Mining Biometric Data to Predict Programmer Expertise and Task Difficulty. Cluster Computing, 21(1):1097–1107, 2018.
M. Yeh, D. Gopstein, Y. Yan, and Y. Zhuang. Detecting and Comparing Brain Activity in Short Program Comprehension Using EEG. In Proc. Frontiers in Education Conference, pages 1–5. IEEE, 2017.
T. Ishida, and H. Uwano. Synchronized Analysis of Eye Movement and EEG During Program Comprehension. In Proc. Int. Workshop on Eye Movements in Programming (EMIP), pages 26–32, IEEE, 2019.