Talks
The following speakers have already confirmed their participation in the event:
- Emily Jacometti, Flavour
- Stacey Jefferey, CWI
- Felienne Hermans, University of Leiden
- Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology
- Anna Sperotto, University of Twente
- Joyce Westerink, Eindhoven University of Technology
Information about the talks
Stacey Jeffery: A Primer on Quantum Algorithms
An abstract will follow as soon as it’s available
Felienne Hermans: Who is programming for?
Programming has suffered from very low diversity for a long time, especially with respect to gender. Numerous reasons can be found for that, from discrimination of women to a lack of role models. One aspect that has not been studied so extensively is how we teach, and what contexts and examples we use in teaching. In this talk Felienne will explore teaching programming for kids and how it could be more more inclusive.
Alexander Serebrenik: Gender in open-source software development
In this talk I will provide a brief overview of several recent studies of gender and gender diversity in software development teams. Our main findings:
- More gender-diverse GitHub teams are not only more productive than less gender-diverse ones (Vasilescu et al. CHI 2015), but they are also less likely to exhibit suboptimal communication patterns (Catolino et al., ICSE-SEIS 2019) known to lead to suboptimal code patterns (Palomba et al., TSE 2019).
- Social capital obtained by collaboration in GitHub open source projects is beneficial for duration of engagement in an open source project; diversity of information ties, i.e., involvement in very different projects, is beneficial for people of all genders, more so for women than for men (Qiu et al., ICSE 2019).
- If the time permits, I will also touch on the ongoing work related to going beyond gender binary. In this preliminary study has been based on interviews of three transgender women working in software development, we have observed that remote work, facilitated by technological solutions, reduces barriers for participation in software development projects. We conjecture that remote work can benefit other underrepresented minorities as well (Ford et al., ICSE-SEIS 2019).
Joyce Westerink: Estimating stress-induced cortisol variations from skin conductance measurements
In search for a stress indicator that can be used to monitor stress with wearables, we investigated the effect of psychological stress on skin conductance, which is known to be almost instantaneous. In addition, we looked at the effect of stress on the stress hormone cortisol, which is known to peak about 20-30 min later. Then, the relation between the two effects was modeled as a convolution of the height of the skin conductance peaks with the cortisol stress response curve. We used it as a skin conductance-derived estimate of stress-induced cortisol. In a first experiment to validate this model we compared the stress-induced cortisol estimates with cortisol levels actually measured in saliva samples. Forty-six participants completed a series of stressful, boring, and performance tasks, while skin conductance was measured continuously and salivary cortisol samples were taken at regular intervals. We divided subjects in high-cortisol responders and low-cortisol responders according to their increase or decrease in measured salivary cortisol during the stressful task. For both groups, we found that the correlation between the skin conductance-based stress-induced cortisol estimates on the one hand and the measured salivary cortisol on the other hand, were substantial. In addition, we calculated the (Fisher-corrected) mean within-participant correlation between these variables, and found it to be 0.48. We conclude that these results underwrite the use of the skin conductance-based stress-induced cortisol estimates as a stress indicator reflecting in-body cortisol levels.