Sarah Fakhoury

I’m a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Washington State University advised by Dr. Venera Arnaoudova. My research expertise is broadly in developer productivity, bridging techniques from HCI and Cognitive Neuroscience to empirical methods in Software Engineering. The goal of my research is to design programming tools and languages to empower developers to achieve their goals with greater cognitive efficiency.

My research has been recognized with an ACM SigSoft Distinguished Paper Award and is supported by a Microsoft Research Fellowship and the NSF I and II.

Some of the projects I’ve worked on include:

• Quantifying the impact of poor source code lexicon on cognitive load and productivity during bug localization [1] [2].
• Understanding how source code readability impacts cognitive load [2], and whether existing models of code readability align with user’s perceptions in practice [3].
• Understanding how success metrics used to evaluate summarization models align with developer’s perceptions of success [4]
• Building tools to visualize the cognitive load of programmers during computing activties [5], and support the editing of code during eyetracking studies [6] to enable researchers to study cognitive processes of programmers as they code. Play around with the VitalSE demo!

My dissertation proposes a novel framework to model the cognitive load of developers in real-working environments through the combined use of minimally invasive brain imaging (fNIRS) and eye tracking technology. If you’re interested in learning more about biometrics in software engineering, check out my living document: Resources for fNIRS in Software Engineering.