
My advisor is David Redmiles and I am a member of the CRADL research group.
The contribution of my dissertation work is Theseus, a tool which allows remote software developers to explore the connections they share in common with other remote collaborators and as a result, increase the speed at which trust can be built. Trust can be defined as the belief one has about the positive expectations of others. Within this perspective, *affective* trust can be defined as expectations about people's care and concerns--the extra effort people spend to make sure work gets done. People do human-intensive work to calibrate their expectations of their colleagues, especially as a new project begins, such as traversing personal networks for referrals and getting "up to speed" from their contacts. Traversing these networks can be seen as a dialogue and discovery of shared experiences. By visualizing collaborative traces of developers's availability (including their responsiveness and accessibility) and their benevolence (including who fixes whose bugs), Theseus can help developers set expectations for their colleagues when a new project begins.
Theseus is currently in a prototype phase.
New
I just received a 2008 IBM Jazz Innovation Award for work on Ariadne.
My research team received a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Program (UROP) in 2004, as well as an
Eclipse Innovation Grant in 2005 for our work on Ariadne. For the
latter grant, I presented Ariadne with my colleague Stephen Quirk at the Eclipse
Technology Exchange (ETX) workshop at the OOPSLA conference in October of
2005.