Tag: Human-Computer Interaction

Presentation By Mercator Fellow Caroline Jay

Title: Socio-Technical Resilience in Research Software Engineering

Date: 21.10.2025

Time:11:30-12:30

Location: Humboldt-Kabinett, Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489 Berlin

Abstract:

Software quality is influenced by a multitude of factors, from technical, to organisational, to cultural. This talk uses a ‘resilience engineering’ lens to study this issue. This entails examining what helps research software engineering (RSE) teams – and the codebases they create – to respond well and adapt to changes and threats, which are viewed as inevitable. It will explore the role of the professional identity in supporting resilience within the individual, and examine how resilience may be affected by the professional culture in which someone works.

Bio:

Caroline Jay is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Engineering Research at the University of Manchester, where she leads the institution’s AI for Research and Digital Infrastructure Strategies. She is qualified as both a Psychologist (BA, CPsychol) and Computer Scientist (MSc, PhD), and undertakes research exploring the relationship between humans and technology. She is Research Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and holds a Mercator Fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Tutorial on Human-Computer Interaction with Thomas Weber

On June 12th from 10:00 -13:00 we will have a Tutorial on Human-Computer Interaction with Thomas Weber from LMU Munich. The event will be in the Humboldt-Kabinett. Everyone is invited to attend!

The abstract and bio Dr. Weber provided for the event can be found below.

Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models, have proven
highly successful in many domains, including software development. New AI-powered tools not only increase the productivity of professional and novice software developers alike, they also enable completely new, highly flexible ways to interact with software. In this workshop, we will have a hands-on exploration of these capabilities and how they can enable and enhance rich and flexible interaction. However, integrating AI into interactive systems is not without challenges. Thus, we will also discuss how to design and evaluate AI-powered interactive systems to make sure they are both usable and useful.

Bio:

Thomas Weber is a post-doctoral research at LMU Munich. In his research, he investigates how AI-powered systems affect the lives and behavior of software developers from two perspectives: first, considering the rapid pace at which new and improved AI-powered tools emerge, how can developers use these tools productively to create high-quality software? However, software developers not only use AI but are also the ones building and shaping it. Thus secondly, how do requirements differ for building AI systems compared to traditional systems and how does this affect the behavior of developers.

To answer these questions, he combines methods from both software engineering research and human-computer interaction.

PI-Lecture Series Part 8

The final installment of FONDA’s PI-Lecture Series will take place on March 17th from 15:00-17:30 in Adlershof (Humboldt-Kabinett, Rudower Chaussee 25). The following PIs will give talks on their ongoing research:

  • Henning Meyerhenke – Workflow Scheduling and (Other) Graph Algorithms for Parallel & Distributed Systems
  • Thomas Kosch – TBA
  • Ulf Leser – Knowledge Management in Bioinformatics
  • Björn Scheuermann – Modern Web Transport Protocols (online)

We have had a lot of excellent talks over the last few months. The purpose of this lecture series was to introduce all of our new FONDA members to the research areas of the PIs. Based on the quality of questions and conversations, this has been very successful!

I’m looking forward to more conversations about science with everyone at our upcoming spring retreat.

PI Lecture Series Part 6 (with guest!)

For our next set of Monday afternoon talks on March 3rd, Lars Grunske will give a talk on his research area “Understanding Software and DAW Input Spaces”, and we will have a guest lecture by Paul Ralph titled “Evidence Standards Improve Reliability in Scholarly Peer Review“. The talks will take place in the Humboldt-Kabinett of Johann-von-. Neumann-Haus, Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489, Berlin.

Abstract:

Background. Scholarly peer review is “the lynchpin about which the whole business of science is pivoted” (Ziman 1968). Most researchers believe peer review is effective (Ware 2008), but empirical research consistently shows that reviewers cannot reliable distinguish methodologically sound from fundamentally flawed studies (Cole 1981; Peters & Ceci 1982; Lock 1991; Rothwell and Martyn 2000; Price 2014; Ralph 2016). Consequently, we created comprehensive evidence standards and tools to improve peer review in software engineering and related fields. Objective. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of evidence standards on scholarly peer review. Method. A randomized controlled experiment was conducted at an A-ranked software engineering conference. The program committee was randomly divided into two groups: one using a typical conference review process; the other using a standardized process based on the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research (https://acmsigsoft.github.io/EmpiricalStandards/) Results. Evidence standards significantly improve inter-reviewer reliability without harming authors’ or reviewers’ attitudes toward the review process. Reviewers using evidence standards gave more praise and focused more on research methods than style. Discussion. Asking reviewers to write free-text comments about a paper and score it on a 6-point scale from strong reject to strong accept produces data statistically indistinguishable from random noise. This means that decisions are determined entirely by reviewer selection, not the merits of the research. Conventional review processes are therefore scientifically and morally indefensible. While not a silver bullet, evidence standards significantly improve reliability, and the data collected in this study facilitates further refinement of the standards and tooling toward still greater reliability. 

Dr. D. Paul Ralph, PhD (British Columbia), B.Sc. / B.Comm (Memorial), is an award-winning scientist, author, consultant, and Professor of Software Engineering at Dalhousie University. His cutting-edge research at the intersection of software engineering, human-computer interaction, and project management explores the relationship between software teams’ social dynamics and success.

Photo of Paul Ralph in a blurry forest

PI Lecture Series Part 4

Our fourth set of PI-Lectures will be Monday, February 17th starting at 15:00 in Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s main building, Unter den Linden 6. The following PIs will give talks about their ongoing research:

  • Anna-Lena Lamprecht – Workflomics
  • Florian Schintke – SIMD Vectorization of Positional Population Count
  • Dagmar Kainmueller – The Helmholtz Foundation Model Initiative

FONDA PhD student Mario Sänger successfully defends his PhD thesis on “Representation Learning for Biomedical Text Mining”

Mario Sänger, a member of the group “Human-computer interaction for Scientific Software”, successfully defended his PhD thesis on November 25, 2024. His work focuses on using representation learning to extract meaningful connections between biomedical entities, such as genes, diseases, proteins, and pharmaceuticals from a corpus of PubMed abstracts, as well as biomedical knowledge bases. In addition to demonstrating the feasibility of this corpus-wide approach, he also benchmarked and tested existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) for sentence-level relation prediction. His results show that additional context from biomedical knowledge databases does not enhance the most robust carefully tuned PLMs.

In FONDA, he collaborated with Prof. Dr. Thomas Kosch, exploring the use of ChatGPT as a tool to support users in designing and implementing scientific workflows.

Congratulations Mario, and all the best!