Faculty Candidate Presentation: Multimedia Integrated Development Environments

[Jerry]

(Please try to attend this talk. A good audience helps us recruit good faculty --- JW)


THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

Presents an Invited Talk by Faculty Candidate

Andreas Stefik

Multimedia Integrated Development Environments

Comprehending and debugging computer programs are inherently difficult tasks. The current approach to building program execution and debugging environments is to use exclusively visual stimuli. I present an alternative: the Sonified Omniscient Debugger (SOD), a program execution and debugging environment designed to output carefully chosen spoken auditory cues to supplement visual stimuli. Originally designed for the blind, earlier work suggested that SOD may benefit sighted programmers as well. I evaluate the SOD environment in a formal debugging experiment comparing 1) a visual debugger, 2) an auditory debugger, and 3) a multimedia debugger, which includes both the visual and auditory stimuli. Results indicate that while auditory debuggers on their own are significantly less effective for sighted users when compared with visual and multimedia debuggers, multimedia debuggers might benefit sighted programmers under certain circumstances. Specifically, I found that while multimedia debuggers do not provide instant usability, once programmers have some practice, their performance improves under certain metrics.

Thursday, March 25, 2009
11:00-12:00
EB 0015

Dr. Stefik will meet informally with students after his presentation.

[raptor]

Will do my best to be there.  I encourage other students to do the same.  This is your chance to have input on future faculty.

Scott

[Tangent Orchard]

Would love to attend but I have a class at that time, sorry.  Do you know when any future dates/times will be, perchance?

[raptor]

Thoughts:

Very interesting work taking into account several facets of Computer Science.
Very dynamic presentation style and can keep audiences attention.
Seemed as though student involvement in research was important.
At some points could almost be too energetic. (Felt like he was over eager to ask questions and jump to conclusions regarding the nature of a question)

Scott