Effective Representation and Dissemination of Programming Knowledge
18/11/2022
Speaker
Abstract
In the early days of programming, documentation used to exist only in scarce source code comments and quickly-outdated textbooks. Over the past twenty years, the advent and rise of web-based collaboration platforms has substantially changed the way programming knowledge is externalised and accessed and it has created a new research challenge: how can we effectively process and make sense of the large amount and wide variety of information available to support programmers' decision making? In this talk, I will portray the maturation of a research area, from studies on the information needs of programmers and qualitative analyses of the information contained in different sources, to documentation generation and retrieval approaches which integrate information from different sources. To enable more comprehensive approaches which can utilise all relevant knowledge, I will conclude with a roadmap outlining a more systematic treatment of information from different sources, based on knowledge graphs, multi-document summarisation, and source code representations for machine learning applications.
Bio
Christoph Treude is a Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. The goal of his research is to improve the quality of software and the productivity of those producing it. He has authored more than 100 scientific articles with more than 200 co-authors, and his work has received an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (2018-2020), industry funding from Google, Facebook, and DST, as well as four best paper awards including two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards. He serves as a board member on the Editorial Board of the Empirical Software Engineering journal and was general co-chair for the 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. In 2023, he will serve as general chair for the 31st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension and the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Technical Debt.