Christopher A. Bogart

Postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

About me

I am interested in the human-computer interaction challenges involved in helping people comprehend, develop, and maintain software. I am particularly interested in studying how humans clarify complex ideas and instructions among themselves as inspiration for new ways of enhancing human-computer interaction in software engineering.

I received an MS in computer science in 1992, then worked as a software engineer in Boulder and Denver, CO, for 15 years before returning to school at Oregon State to pursue a doctorate. I enjoy the work of software engineering, but I was motivated to move into academic research by a desire to improve the tools I was using.

My dissertation research involved studying the work practices of scientific modelers (specifically cognitive modelers: psychologists who model cognition in order to understand human behavior). My approach involves designing a tool that can capture and make explicit the changing, task-specific "evaluation abstractions" that are implicit in a modeler’s exploration of model output. The research has involved qualitative and quantitative empirical methods, language design, and implementation of an experimental tool (an Eclipse plugin implemented in Scala) to support modelers at the Air Force Research Laboratory who use the ACT-R and RML cognitive modeling languages.

I am currently working as a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University with Jim Herbsleb, learning more about how people collaborate to build and maintain scientific software.

Published Papers

Cognitive Modeling

Designing a debugging interaction language for cognitive modelers: an initial case study in Natural Programming Plus. Chris Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Scott Douglass, Hannah Adams, Rachel White, ACM CHI 2012.

Does my model work? Evaluation abstractions of cognitive modelers, Christopher Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Scott Douglass, David Piorkowski, Amber Shinsel, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2010, 49-58.

Information Foraging

How Programmers Debug, Revisited: An Information Foraging Theory Perspective. Joseph Lawrance, Christopher Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy, Kyle Rector, Scott D. Fleming, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (accepted; to appear in TSE in 2013).

Reactive Information Foraging: An empirical investigation of theory-based recommender systems for programmers. David Piorkowski, Scott Fleming, Chris Scaffidi, Chris Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Bonnie John, Rachel Bellamy, Calvin Swart, ACM CHI 2012.

Modeling Programmer Navigation: A head-to-head empirical evaluation of predictive models. David Piorkowski, Scott Fleming, Chris Scaffidi, Liza John, Chris Bogart, Bonnie John, Margaret Burnett, and Rachel Bellamy, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, (VL/HCC) 2011, pp. 109-116.

Reactive Information Foraging for Evolving Goals, Joseph Lawrance, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy, Christopher Bogart, and Calvin Swart, ACM CHI, 2010.

End-User Software Engineering

Using traits of web macro scripts to predict reuse, Chris Scaffidi, Chris Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Allen Cypher, Brad Myers, Mary Shaw, Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 21(5), December 2010.

End-User Software Engineering and Distributed Cognition, M. Burnett, C. Bogart, J. Cao, V. Grigoreanu, T. Kulesza, and J. Lawrance, Proceedings of ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering for End-User Programmers, Vancouver, BC: 2009.

Predicting Reuse of End-User Web Macro Scripts, Chris Scaffidi, Chris Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Allen Cypher, Brad Myers, and Mary Shaw, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Corvallis, OR, Sept. 2009, pp. 93-100.

End-User Programming in the Wild: A Field Study of CoScripter Scripts, Christopher Bogart, Margaret Burnett, Allen Cypher, and Christopher Scaffidi, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, Sept. 2008, pp. 39-46.

Can Feature Design Reduce the Gender Gap in End-User Software Development Environments? Valentina Grigoreanu, Jill Cao, Todd Kulesza, Christopher Bogart, Kyle Rector, Margaret Burnett, and Susan Wiedenbeck, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, Sept. 2008, pp. 149-156.

Software Visualization for End-User Programmers: Trial Period Obstacles, Neeraja Subrahmaniyan, Margaret Burnett, and Christopher Bogart, ACM Symposium on Software Visualization, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, Sept. 2008, pp. 135-144.

Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms

This paper was written while I was a master's student at Colorado State University, long ago. Genetic algorithms and neural networks: optimizing connections and connectivity Darrell Whitley, Tim Starkweather, and Chris Bogart, Parallel Computing, 1990, pp. 347-361.

Projects

Here is an OpenGL implementation of the board game Khet for CS550, fall 2008. There are executables for mac and windows.

For CS523, winter 2009, Calculating Frobenius numbers with Boolean Toeplitz matrix multiplication. You can only buy Chicken McNuggets in boxes of 6, 9, or 20. Sadly, there's no way to buy exactly 43 nuggets. The paper is about a faster way to calculate the largest number of McNuggets you can't buy.

Blogging

I have a blog called Sambangu.