Week 22: 1/21/2016-1/28/2016

This past week I revised our Tapia submission, updated the VISSOFT website, figured out a bug in iTrace, finished editing/revising my NCWIT application (and submitted it), and I read a paper on eye-tracking data analysis.

I made minor formatting changes to our Tapia submission to get it into the correct specifications for submission. We will be submitting it today or tomorrow.

I added the program committee to the VISSOFT 2016 website's Committee page. I had to add each individual person (20 in total) to the Committee's page file. Their names, universities, and web-pages had to be listed.

We are getting ready to release a new version of iTrace that includes support for Stack Overflow and Bug Report documents. There was one bug I had to fix. Both the Bug Report and the Stack Overflow managers were trying to create a function, in Javascript, at the same time named the same thing. So, the Bug Report function would overwrite the Stack Overflow function destroying the ability to capture gazes for Stack Overflow documents. A simple function name change was needed to solve the issue and we will be moving forward with the release soon.

I finished editing my NCWIT Collegiate Award video and written material. I submitted my application on Sunday, 1/24/2016.

Finally, I read ScanMatch: A novel method for comparing fixation sequences, and determined that we can use ScanMatch in two different ways to see how we can identify patterns in eye-tracking data. We hope that there will be a lot of commonality among expert software developer sequential eye-gaze data and a lot of commonality among novice software developer sequential eye-gaze data, but not a lot of commonality between novices and experts. 

Week 21: 1/14/2016-1/21/2016

This past week I worked on editing our Tapia poster submission and I worked on my NCWIT Collegiate Award application.

I edited the formatting of the Tapia proposal. I made grammar changes and made the table more clear to read.
I spent the majority of my time this week recording and editing my technical project video for the NCWIT award application. I recorded a short demo of iTrace and an explanation of the impact of iTrace in the software engineering community. I had never edited a video before, so I spent some time watching tutorial videos for Camtasia Studio. I am almost done editing the video and I hope to submit the application this weekend.

Weeks 18,19, 20: 12/22/2015-1/14/2016

The past three weeks I worked on iTrace, the VISSOFT website, and multiple scholarship applications.

I finished the implementation for iTrace to gather eye-tracking data on Bug Report documents. I also fixed a bug in iTrace that caused the name of a file not to match the path to that file.

For the VISSOFT website, I added important dates for Research and NIER/Tool Demo paper submissions. I updated the Committee page with the Artifact Evaluation Co-Chairs and the NIER/Tool Demo Co-Chairs. Finally, I wrote in the submission information on the Submission page, so that researchers can begin submitting papers to the conference.

I completed and submitted an application to receive a scholarship to Tapia 2016. I also completed and submitted an application to join SIGSOFT and to apply for travel funding to attend ICSE 2016. Finally, I finished writing the short answer questions for the NCWIT Collegiate Award that I will be applying for in the coming weeks.

Week 17: 12/15/2015-12/22/2015

This past week I completed the first draft of our proposal for Tapia 2016. I also wrote the abstract for our poster proposal for Tapia. I discussed how we seek to explore expertise prediction for software developers. We compare three different machine learning algorithms that are used for our prediction. We have completed testing for the two-class boosted decision tree algorithm and will discuss the next two algorithms to use in future testing. With 85% accuracy we can conclude that we can predict software developer expertise using a two-class boosted decision tree machine learning algorithm.

I also finished work on the initial pass of the VISSOFT 2016 website. The website has been published and can be viewed at the following link:

http://vissoft16.ysu.edu/

Happy Holidays!

Weeks 15,16: 12/01/2015-12/15/2015

That last two weeks were filled with final projects and tests. On Sunday, December 13, 2015, I graduated!

Anyways...
Last week, I read and summarized "Tracking Students’ Cognitive Processes during Program Debugging – An Eye-Movement Approach" by Y. T. Lin, Member, IEEE, C. C. Wu, Y. C. Lin, T. Y. Hou, F. Y. Yang, and C. H. Chang. This paper discussed the differences between high performing(experts) and low performing(novices) students in debugging. 

Weeks 14,15,16: 11/25/2015-12/15/2015

The past few weeks have been very hectic with the end of the Fall semester. Last week was our finals week at YSU. However, I have continued to work on our CREU project.

I wrote the data section of our Tapia poster proposal submission and started to write the introduction. I read two papers, Modeling How Students Learn to Program by Chris Piech and Paulo Blikstein and Tracking Students' Cognitive Processes during Program Debugging - An Eye-movement Approach by Lin et al. I also completed my CREU mid-year report.

I have also been working on the VISSOFT 2016 website, because I am the website chair for this conference.

Week 14: 11/25/2015-12/01/2015

I read and created a summary Powerpoint for Modeling How Students Learn to Program by 
Chris Piech, Mehran Sahami, Daphne Koller, Stephen Cooper, Paulo Blikstein.
It was interesting. It talked about how to use machine learning to model how students progress 
through writing a program. This is interesting to me because I eventually want to pursue educational
technologies.

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