Greetings, colleagues: See below for two talks coming up next week, by ACM Distinguished Speaker Margaret Burnett: Wednesday on the topic of making software work for women as well as for men, Thursday on the topic of the design of programming environments. Please distribute the announcement to students/colleagues who might be interested. Best, Eva Eva M. Fernández Acting Assistant Provost Queens College, City University of New York http://efernandez.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu<http://efernandez.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/> ======================================== WHO SHOULD GO: Anyone who is interested in making their software work as well for women as for men, especially software that helps people solve problems. Wednesday March 22, 2017 5:30PM — 8:00PM Sponsored by Bloomberg L.P. 120 Park Avenue New York, NY 10017 Gender-Inclusive Software: What the Software industry Needs to Know Gender inclusiveness in software companies is receiving a lot of attention these days, but it overlooks a potentially critical factor: software itself. Research into how individual differences cluster by gender shows that males and females often work differently with software for problem-solving (e.g., tools for programming, debugging, spreadsheet modeling, end-user programming, game-based learning, visualizing information, etc.). Burnett will present the first real-world investigation of software practitioners’ ability to identify gender-inclusiveness issues in software they create/maintain, using a method called GenderMag. At the core of the method are five facets of gender differences drawn from a large body of foundational work from computer science, psychology, education, communications, and women’s studies. In addition to reporting results from the investigation, she will recount tales from the trenches on what it’s like to use GenderMag, where the pitfalls lie, and all the things still to be learned. Speaker Bio: An ACM Distinguished Speaker, Margaret Burnett’s research is in human issues of software development, which lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. She focuses on end-user programming, end-user software engineering, information foraging theory as applied to programming, and gender issues in those contexts. Burnett’s awards for her work include several Best Paper recognitions, IBM’s International Faculty Award, and the NSF Young Investigator Award, in addition to being honored for her mentoring, collaboration, and teaching at Oregon State University. She has chaired workshop and papers committees for the ACM and IEEE and co-chairs the Executive Committee of the Academic Alliance of the National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT). Talk followed by a cocktail reception. Free and open to the public, but you must register in advance at https://go.bloomberg.com/promo/invite/gender-inclusive-software-what-the-sof... ======================================================== ======================================================== WHO SHOULD GO: Anyone who designs software for an information-rich domain with navigation-intensive tasks. Programming environments are just one example of the theory-guided design considerations the speaker will present. Thursday, March 23, 2017 6:00PM — 9:00PM Sponsored by NYTech Alliance Location: Meister Seelig & Fein LLP 125 Park Avenue 7th Floor New York, NY 10017 Developers Need Usability Too: Theory-Guided Design of Programming Environments Programming is an information-rich and navigation-intensive task, especially when comprehending source code written by others, making modifications to that code, and debugging. In these respects, programming is similar to other domains that require exploring large amounts of textual information, problem-solving, and synthesis, like finance, research, or even online shopping. Information Foraging Theory is very influential in the field of human-computer interaction as a method to describe and predict people's navigation behavior through these information-rich environments. In recent years, the software engineering community has begun to study program navigation and tools to support it. Some of these navigation tools are very useful, but they lack a human-oriented theoretical basis that could reduce the need for ad hoc tool building approaches by shedding light on what is fundamentally necessary to the people using such tools. To help fill this gap, we present what Information Foraging Theory tells us about how to support programmer navigation during software maintenance. We show what our results reveal about existing software engineering tools, and how they point the way forward for future software engineering tools. The insights gained from studying program navigation can generalize to other information-rich fields. Speaker Bio: Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and an ACM CHI Academy member. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software created by users who are not trained in programming. She also pioneered the use of information foraging theory to solve software engineering problems, and leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. She serves on a variety of HCI and Software Engineering committees and editorial boards, and on the Academic Alliance Advisory Board of the U.S. National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). More on Burnett can be found at: http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/ Preceded by light hors d'oeuvres https://www.eventbrite.com/e/developers-need-usability-too-theory-guided-des... ========================================================