Margaret Burnett
Has also published under the name of:
"Margaret M. Burnett"
Personal Homepage:
http://www.cs.orst.edu/~burnettCurrent place of employment:
Oregon State University
Margaret Burnett is a Professor of Computer Science at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon StateUniversity. Her research focuses on human issues of programming languages and environments, especially when the programming is done by people not trained as professional programmers. She conducts her research with various visual programming languages (especially declarative ones), most recently by experimenting with and evaluating new approaches for supporting end-user software engineering. She is the principal architect of the Forms/3 and the FAR visual programming languages and, together with Gregg Rothermel, of the WYSIWYT testing methodology for end-user programmers.
She is currently Project Director of the EUSES Consortium, a NSF-funded multi-university collaboration among Oregon State University and Carnegie Mellon, Pennsylvania State, University of Nebraska, Drexel University, University of Cambridge, and IBM to help End Users Shape Effective Software.
Publications by Margaret Burnett (bibliography)
» 2008 «
Burnett, Margaret, Costabile, Maria Francesca, Catarci, Tiziana, Ruyter, Boris de, Tan, Desney S., Czerwinski, Mary and Lund, Arnold (eds.) Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI 2008 5-10 April, 2008, Florence, Italy.
Subrahmaniyan, Neeraja, Beckwith, Laura, Grigoreanu, Valentina, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Narayanan, Vaishnavi, Bucht, Karin, Drummond, Russell and Fern, Xiaoli (2008): Testing vs. code inspection vs. what else?: male and female end users' debugging strategies. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 617-626. Available online
“Little is known about the strategies end-user programmers use in debugging their programs, and even less is known about gender differences that may exist in these strategies. Without this type of information, designers of end-user programming systems cannot know the "target" at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers. We present a study investigating this issue. We asked end-user programmers to debug spreadsheets and to describe their debugging strategies. Using mixed methods, we analyzed their strategies and looked for relationships among participants' strategy choices, gender, and debugging success. Our results indicate that males and females debug in quite different ways, that opportunities for improving support for end-user debugging strategies for both genders are abundant, and that tools currently available to end-user debuggers may be especially deficient in supporting debugging strategies used by females.”
Copyrights may apply
Lawrance, Joseph, Bellamy, Rachel, Burnett, Margaret and Rector, Kyle (2008): Using information scent to model the dynamic foraging behavior of programmers in maintenance tasks. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 1323-1332. Available online
“In recent years, the software engineering community has begun to study program navigation and tools to support it. Some of these navigation tools are very useful, but they lack a theoretical basis that could reduce the need for ad hoc tool building approaches by explaining what is fundamentally necessary in such tools. In this paper, we present PFIS (Programmer Flow by Information Scent), a model and algorithm of programmer navigation during software maintenance. We also describe an experimental study of expert programmers debugging real bugs described in real bug reports for a real Java application. We found that PFIS' performance was close to aggregated human decisions as to where to navigate, and was significantly better than individual programmers' decisions.”
Copyrights may apply
Myers, Brad A., Burnett, Margaret, Rosson, Mary Beth, Ko, Andrew J. and Blackwell, Alan (2008): End user software engineering: chi'2008 special interest group meeting. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 2371-2374. Available online
“End users create software whenever they write, for instance, educational simulations, spreadsheets, or dynamic e-business web applications. Researchers are working to bring the benefits of rigorous software engineering methodologies to these end users to try to make their software more reliable. Unfortunately, errors are pervasive in end-user software, and the resulting impact is sometimes enormous. This special interest group meeting has two purposes: to incorporate attendees' and feedback into an emerging survey of the state of this interesting new sub-area, and generally to bring together the community of researchers who are addressing this topic, with the companies that are creating end-user programming tools.”
Copyrights may apply
Stumpf, Simone, Sullivan, Erin, Fitzhenry, Erin, Oberst, Ian, Wong, Weng-Keen and Burnett, Margaret (2008): Integrating rich user feedback into intelligent user interfaces. In: Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2008. pp. 50-59. Available online
“The potential for machine learning systems to improve via a mutually beneficial exchange of information with users has yet to be explored in much detail. Previously, we found that users were willing to provide a generous amount of rich feedback to machine learning systems, and that the types of some of this rich feedback seem promising for assimilation by machine learning algorithms. Following up on those findings, we ran an experiment to assess the viability of incorporating real-time keyword-based feedback in initial training phases when data is limited. We found that rich feedback improved accuracy but an initial unstable period often caused large fluctuations in classifier behavior. Participants were able to give feedback by relying heavily on system communication in order to respond to changes. The results show that in order to benefit from the user's knowledge, machine learning systems must be able to absorb keyword-based rich feedback in a graceful manner and provide clear explanations of their predictions.”
Copyrights may apply
Subrahmaniyan, Neeraja, Burnett, Margaret and Bogart, Christopher (2008): Software visualization for end-user programmers: trial period obstacles. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization 2008. pp. 135-144. Available online
“Software visualization for end-user programmers is a relatively unexplored opportunity area. There are advances in software visualization research pertinent to this, but the adoption stage has been entirely ignored. In this paper, we focus on a popular facilitator of adoption decisions: the free trial period. We conducted a case study of an end-user programmer (an accountant) in this situation, as she tried out a commercial spreadsheet visualization tool to make an adoption decision. The results have implications for both theory and design, revealing open questions, design opportunities, and strengths and weaknesses of theoretical foundations.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2007 «
Stumpf, Simone, Rajaram, Vidya, Li, Lida, Burnett, Margaret, Dietterich, Thomas G., Sullivan, Erin, Drummond, Russell and Herlocker, Jonathan (2007): Toward harnessing user feedback for machine learning. In: Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2007. pp. 82-91. Available online
“There has been little research into how end users might be able to communicate advice to machine learning systems. If this resource -- the users themselves -- could somehow work hand-in-hand with machine learning systems, the accuracy of learning systems could be improved and the users' understanding and trust of the system could improve as well. We conducted a think-aloud study to see how willing users were to provide feedback and to understand what kinds of feedback users could give. Users were shown explanations of machine learning predictions and asked to provide feedback to improve the predictions. We found that users had no difficulty providing generous amounts of feedback. The kinds of feedback ranged from suggestions for reweighting of features to proposals for new features, feature combinations, relational features, and wholesale changes to the learning algorithm. The results show that user feedback has the potential to significantly improve machine learning systems, but that learning algorithms need to be extended in several ways to be able to assimilate this feedback.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2006 «
Beckwith, Laura, Kissinger, Cory, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Lawrance, Joseph, Blackwell, Alan and Cook, Curtis (2006): Tinkering and gender in end-user programmers' debugging. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 231-240. Available online
“Earlier research on gender effects with software features intended to help problem-solvers in end-user debugging environments has shown that females are less likely to use unfamiliar software features. This poses a serious problem because these features may be key to helping them with debugging problems. Contrasting this with research documenting males' inclination for tinkering in unfamiliar environments, the question arises as to whether encouraging tinkering with new features would help females overcome the factors, such as low self-efficacy, that led to the earlier results. In this paper, we present an experiment with males and females in an end-user debugging setting, and investigate how tinkering behavior impacts several measures of their debugging success. Our results show that the factors of tinkering, reflection, and self-efficacy, can combine in multiple ways to impact debugging effectiveness differently for males than for females.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2005 «
Beckwith, Laura, Burnett, Margaret, Wiedenbeck, Susan, Cook, Curtis, Sorte, Shraddha and Hastings, Michelle (2005): Effectiveness of end-user debugging software features: are there gender issues?. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 869-878. Available online
“Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals-but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in self-efficacy and feature acceptance, with females exhibiting lower self-efficacy and lower feature acceptance. The results also show that these differences can significantly reduce females' effectiveness.”
Copyrights may apply
Myers, Brad A., Burnett, Margaret and Rosson, Mary Beth (2005): End users creating effective software. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 2047-2048. Available online
“Is it possible to bring the benefits of rigorous software engineering methodologies to end users? End users create software when they use spreadsheet systems, web authoring tools and graphical languages, when they write educational simulations, spreadsheets, and dynamic e-business web applications. Unfortunately, however, errors are pervasive in end-user software, and the resulting impact is sometimes enormous. A growing number of researchers and developers are working on ways to make the software created by end users more reliable. This special interest group meeting will help support the community of researchers who are addressing this topic.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2004 «
Robertson, T. J., Prabhakararao, Shrinu, Burnett, Margaret, Cook, Curtis, Ruthruff, Joseph R., Beckwith, Laura and Phalgune, Amit (2004): Impact of interruption style on end-user debugging. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 287-294. Available online
“Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the proper mechanism to alert the user to this information. The choice of alerting mechanism can be important, because as previous research has shown, different interruption styles have different potential advantages and disadvantages. To explore impacts of interruptions in the end-user debugging domain, this paper describes an empirical comparison of two interruption styles that have been used to alert end-user programmers to debugging information. Our results show that negotiated-style interruptions were superior to immediate-style interruptions in several issues of importance to end-user debugging, and further suggest that a reason for this superiority may be that immediate-style interruptions encourage different debugging strategies.”
Copyrights may apply
» 2003 «
Wilson, Aaron, Burnett, Margaret, Beckwith, Laura, Granatir, Orion, Casburn, Ledah, Cook, Curtis, Durham, Mike and Rothermel, Gregg (2003): Harnessing curiosity to increase correctness in end-user programming. In: Cockton, Gilbert and Korhonen, Panu (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2003 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 5-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. pp. 305-312.
» 2002 «
Burnett, Margaret, Yang, Sherry and Summet, Jay (2002): A scalable method for deductive generalization in the spreadsheet paradigm. In Interactions, 9 (5) pp. 9-11
Burnett, Margaret, Yang, Sherry and Summet, Jay (2002): Appendices A--D: A scalable method for deductive generalization in the spreadsheet paradigm. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 9 (4) pp. 1-5
Burnett, Margaret, Yang, Sherry and Summet, Jay (2002): A scalable method for deductive generalization in the spreadsheet paradigm. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 9 (4) pp. 253-284
“In this paper, we present an efficient method for automatically generalizing programs written in spreadsheet languages. The strategy is to do generalization through incremental analysis of logical relationships among concrete program entities from the perspective of a particular computational goal. The method uses deductive dataflow analysis with algebraic back-substitution rather than inference with heuristics, and there is no need for generalization-related dialog with the user. We present the algorithms and their time complexities and show that, because the algorithms perform their analyses incrementally, on only the on-screen program elements rather than on the entire program, the method is scalable. Performance data is presented to help demonstrate the scalability.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1998 «
Burnett, Margaret and Gottfried, Herkimer J. (1998): Graphical Definitions: Expanding Spreadsheet Languages through Direct Manipulation and Gestures. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 5 (1) pp. 1-33
“In the past, attempts to extend the spreadsheet paradigm to support graphical objects, such as colored circles or user-defined graphical types, have led to approaches featuring either a direct way of creating objects graphically or strong compatibility with the spreadsheet paradigm, but not both. This inability to conveniently go beyond numbers and strings without straying outside the spreadsheet paradigm has been a limiting factor in the applicability of spreadsheet languages. In this article we present graphical definitions, an approach that removes this limitation, allowing both simple and complex graphical objects to be programmed directly using direct manipulation and gestures, in a manner that fits seamlessly within the spread-sheet paradigm. We also describe an empirical study, in which subjects programmed such objects faster and with fewer errors using this approach than when using a traditional approach to formula specification. Because the approach is expressive enough to be used with both built-in and user-defined types, it allows the directness of demonstrational and spread-sheet techniques to be used in programming a wider range of applications than has been possible before.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1997 «
Wilcox, E. M., Atwood, J. W., Burnett, Margaret, Cadiz, Jonathan J. and Cook, Curtis (1997): Does Continuous Visual Feedback Aid Debugging in Direct-Manipulation Programming Systems?. In: Pemberton, Steven (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 97 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia. pp. 258-265. Available online
“Continuous visual feedback is becoming a common feature in direct-manipulation programming systems of all kinds -- from demonstrational macro builders to spreadsheet packages to visual programming languages featuring direct manipulation. But does continuous visual feedback actually help in the domain of programming? There has been little investigation of this question, and what evidence there is from related domains points in conflicting directions. To advance what is known about this issue, we conducted an empirical study to determine whether the inclusion of continuous visual feedback into a direct-manipulation programming system helps with one particular task: debugging. Our results were that although continuous visual feedback did not significantly help with debugging in general, it did significantly help with debugging in some circumstances. Our results also indicate three factors that may help determine those circumstances.”
Copyrights may apply
Cook, Curtis, Burnett, Margaret and Boom, Derrick (1997): A Bug's Eye View of Immediate Visual Feedback in Direct-Manipulation Programming Systems. In: Empirical Studies of Programmers - Seventh Workshop October 24-26, 1997, 1997, Alexandria, Virginia. pp. 20-41. Available online
“Immediate visual feedback is becoming a common feature in direct-manipulation programming systems of all kinds -- from demonstrational macro builders to spreadsheet packages to visual programming languages featuring direct manipulation. But does immediate visual feedback actually help in the domain of programming? We previously reported on an empirical study to determine whether the inclusion of immediate visual feedback into a direct-manipulation programming system helps with one particular task: debugging. In that study, subjects debugged programs with and without immediate visual feedback. We found that although immediate visual feedback did not significantly help with debugging in general, it did significantly help with debugging in some circumstances. In this paper, we follow up on those results, looking at attributes of the bugs themselves to see if they help to determine the circumstances in which feedback helps with debugging. We analyze how particular bugs and collections of bugs grouped by error type related to subjects' debugging abilities with and without immediate visual feedback, which we term the "which" questions; how bugs' position on the screen related to subjects' debugging abilities with and without immediate visual feedback, termed the "where" questions; and whether the presence or absence of immediate visual feedback affected the speed and order in which bugs were corrected, termed the "when" questions. The results show that a bug's error type and screen position were together a strong predictor of whether feedback would aid in identifying and correcting it, and that these two factors also significantly influenced how feedback affected the speed and order in which the bugs were corrected.”
Copyrights may apply
Gottfried, Herkimer J. and Burnett, Margaret (1997): Programming Complex Objects in Spreadsheets: An Empirical Study Comparing Textual Formula Entry with Direct Manipulation and Gestures. In: Empirical Studies of Programmers - Seventh Workshop October 24-26, 1997, 1997, Alexandria, Virginia. pp. 42-68. Available online
“Spreadsheets have traditionally provided strong support for computations that use simple types such as numbers and strings, while providing little or no support for programming with more complex objects such as colored circles or user-defined types. In expanding spreadsheets to support complex objects, we wanted to learn whether programs using complex objects could be constructed more effectively by defining formulas textually or through the use of graphical techniques such as direct manipulation and gestures. In this paper we present an empirical study comparing these two techniques for constructing spreadsheet programs that use complex objects. The results show that programmers can use graphical techniques to program complex objects faster and with fewer errors than with the textual methods traditional of spreadsheets.”
Copyrights may apply
» 1995 «
Burnett, Margaret, Goldberg, Adele and Lewis, Ted (1995): Visual Object-Oriented Programming: Concepts and Environments. Prentice Hall
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Mar 20th, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
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