News – Titus Barik

July 2021

Panelist for “Are academics working on the right problems?” at ICSE 2021, along with Felienne Hermans and Jordi Cabot (promotional tweet).
Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on Intelligent Tutoring Systems and compiler error messages for novices and experts.
See our AI for Programming Education project on GitHub, which provides AI-powered assistance to students taking programming classes and educators teaching them.

Beware the productivity vampires! 🦇🧛🏽‍♀️
Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on future investments in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
Presented on Influence without Authority at PROSE weekly reading group.
Happy Birthday! 🎂

🛠 PROSE team’s feature, IntelliCode Suggestions in Competion List, is now available in Visual Studio 16.9.
Our paper, “Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?” (ICSE 2020) is in the list of ACM SIGSOFT Research Highlights (see the tweet)!
🛠 We’ve released date/time formatting by example to IntelliCode Insiders! Also take a look at our tweet about it. Looking forward to adding support for additional libraries, including dayjs and luxon. 🎉
Submitted one paper to FSE!
Submitted one article to CACM!

On staycation until the end of the year. See you in January! 🎄
📄 Our paper, “Remote, but connected: How #TidyTuesday Provides an Online Community of Practice for Data Scientists”, has been accepted to CSCW 2021!
Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on tools for developers.
📄 Two papers conditionally accepted to CHI 2021! I also reviewed three papers.
Thinking about (partially) scripted live demos with tools like doitlive (CLI) and VSCode Hacker Type (seen in Writing Code like a Real Hacker).
Many discussions on Ethics and AI. An important article by Timnit Gebru about her last days at Google: “Right now, it’s obviously very difficult to imagine how anybody can do any real research within these corporations.”
See Automated Data Visualization with Falx (by UW PLSE and others), which combines data visualization using examples and synthesis.
An old article (2008) by Peet M. about the infinitely profitable program, GO.COM.
The Productivity+Intelligence group at Microsoft Research has multiple openings for researchers and interns.

My colleague Tom Zimmermann has been elevated to IEEE Fellow for contributions to data science in software engineering, research, and practice. Congratulations Tom!
📽 Vivek Halder has made a YouTube video covering our work on pain points with computational notebooks.
Official Zoom background for Four Seasons Total Landscaping!
November 4 is National Stress Awareness Day.

🎬 Conducted our workshop, “Lights! Camera! Action! Effective storytelling through video demos, screencasts, and more”, for Learning Day in DevDiv (Career and Leadership Track, with Mario Juarez of StoryCo).
Invited to the VL/HCC 2021 Organizing Committee as Publicity Chair.
What is the role of microstudies in software enginering research?

Three papers submitted to CHI!
Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on Computer Science education.

Presented our work on stress and technical interviews to the Systems Reading group at Netflix. Lots of great questions and discussions around inclusive interview design.
Presented my talk, “Building Tools for Computational Notebooks: A PL+HCI Approach“, at the PL+HCI “Swimmer” School. Daphne Miedema has a nice blog post about the experience.
Interesting job description for Senior Human Factors Researcher at Apple: “An ideal candidate is a skilled storyteller fascinated by people. They are technical, with a deep familiarity of ML development, but also heavily rely on intuition and empathy for others. They approach research with curiosity and an appreciation for the infinite ways the human experience can vary. Readily moving between minute details and big ideas, they advocate for all people at every step in the process, engaging others in productive debate.”
Danny Simmons, Engineering Manager for the PROSE team, writes about the role of research in engineering.

📄 🏆 Received Distinguished Paper Award for Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language? at ICSE 2020.
Received Distinguished Reviewer Award for ICPC 2020.
After many years, found the source of my trickling AWS charges: it was SimpleDB.
🛠 The July release of the Python for extension for Visual Studio Code is here, with Gather, the new extension for notebooks clean up.
Considering “THE SCIENCE SHOULD NOT STAND IN THE WAY OF THIS” as a new opening for rebuttals.
Plasmic is a visual builder for React.
Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on tools for data science.

📄 Read our blog post (Microsoft Research Blog): “Old tools, new tricks: Improving the computational notebook experience for data scientists,” spanning our research over three CHI papers.
📄 Our paper, “Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance?”, has been accepted to FSE!

Two papers have been accepted to CHI!
📄 Our paper, “Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?” has been accepted to ICSE!
The PROSE team is moving to DevDiv!