Margaret M. Burnett

Distinguished Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon, 97331-5501, USA

email: my-last-name at eecs dot oregonstate dot edu
voice: 541-737-2539, FAX: 541-737-1300
office location: Kelley Engineering Center, 3051
Zoom location: https://tinyurl.com/MargaretBurnettZoom
Zoom Passcode: If you're in one of my classes, see the class Canvas page for this information. If you aren't in my classes, send me email for the passcode.

News

• April 2021: Honored to be receiving ACM IUI's Highest Impact Award, for our 2015 IUI paper: Principles of Explanatory Debugging to Personalize Interactive Machine Learning, by Todd Kulesza, Margaret Burnett, Weng-Keen Wong, and Simone Stumpf. Come see our talk and panel at IUI on April 17!
• March 2021: Presenting a keynote on March 15 at ACM SIGUCCS on how universities can improve the equity and inclusion of their own IT. Registration is free this year!
• August 2020: The United Nations meets GenderMag! See the August 2020 UNESCO report on Artificial Intelligence and Gender Equality.
• May 2020: The GenderMag Project's 2019 commitment with CSforALL is being showcased at the CSforALL site. The commitment has enabled CSforALL members like BootUp PD and WonderWorkshop to obtain iGIANT Seals of Approval for their processes for finding and fixing biases in the software/IT they offer. Here's an an interview about it.
• Jan. 2020: I'm proud to have been honored with a 2020 iGIANT Champion Award. More information: iGIANT press release.
• Jan. 2020: Here's the recording of the Carnegie-Mellon University colloquim on Doing Inclusive Design I gave earlier this month. This is now the most up-to-date video on the GenderMag method.
• Sept. 2019: Here's an interview about GenderMag on the IEEE's Software Engineering Radio podcast series. Thanks to Felienne Hermans for being such a great interviewer.
• July 1, 2019: Here's the Oregon Public Broadcasting Think-out-loud program featuring GenderMag. (GenderMag is the second segment, starts about 20 minutes in.
• March 2019: Here are Anicia Peters (Namibia Univ. Science and Tech.) and me on Good Morning Namibia, talking about GenderMag and the importance to Namibians, Africans, and everyone, of diversity in technology.
  
• Jan. 2019: Latest GenderMag news: GenderMag is expanding to move directly from finding a gender bias in software to fixing it. Details in are in our CHI'19 paper: From Gender Biases to Gender-Inclusive Design: An Empirical Investigation.
• Nov. 2018: I'm an ACM Distinguished Speaker again. If you would like me to give a talk on gender-inclusive software (and you meet ACM's other criteria), ACM will pay for my airfare to do so.
• Feb 2018: The NSF Science360 radio is featuring the "Engineering Out Loud" interview on GenderMag.

Bio, Research, and Interests

Margaret Burnett is an OSU Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She was the principal architect of the Forms/3 and FAR visual programming languages, and co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software for computer users that are not trained in programming. She pioneered the use of information foraging theory in the domain of software debugging, and leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and an award-winning mentor. She currently serves on three editorial boards, and has served in over 50 conference organization and program committee roles. She is also on the Academic Alliance Advisory Board of the National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT).

Recent talks

• Gender-inclusive software:
  • Here's the recording of the CMU talk on "Doing Inclusive Design: From GenderMag to InclusiveMag" I gave in January 2020 This is now the most up-to-date video on the GenderMag method. (Length: about 1 hour including Q&A).
  • Podcast: Here's an OSU "Engineering Out Loud" interview on my research on gender-inclusive software. The NSF Science360 radio is featuring it.
  • Distinguished Prof Lecture: Here's my Distinguished Professor Lecture on Gender-Inclusive Software. (The actual talk starts around 3 minutes 45 seconds in.)
  • CHI'16: ACM has posted the GenderMag talk I gave at CHI'16 (20 minutes). The paper itself won a Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI.
• End-user software engineering: Here's an ACM webinar: "End-User Software Engineering: Beyond the Silos". I presented it on June 18, 2015, and it's now available for free from ACM on youtube. I'm the presenter and Brad Myers is the moderator.

More Information

• The GenderMag method to help software developers & usability professionals find and fix software features with gender-inclusiveness “bugs”.
• Our project on Variations to support exploratory programming. This is a joint research effort involving Martin Erwig and me here at OSU, along with researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Univ. Washington, and Univ. Nebraska.
• The EUSES Consortium and its work on end-user software engineering. (EUSES=End Users Shaping Effective Software).
• The Forms/3 and FAR visual programming languages.
• My CV (pdf).
• A downloadable headshot for publicity purposes.
• My papers.
• Google Scholar profile.

Upcoming Presentations and Events

You can hear about some of the projects I've been working on lately at one of these events:

• March 2021: I'm presenting a keynote on March 15 at ACM SIGUCCS on how universities can improve the equity and inclusion of their own IT. Registration is free this year!
• As of Nov. 2018, I'm an ACM Distinguished Speaker again. If you would like me to give a talk on gender-inclusive software (and you meet ACM's other criteria), ACM will pay for my airfare to do so.

Teaching

This year I'm teaching:

• CS 468/568: (HCI 2) Inclusive Design with Personas. MW 10:00-11:50 (zoom). This course is offered every year. Here is the class website.

• CS 564: FIELD STUDIES IN SE AND HCI. This course deals with the type of field study known as the "case" study. These are studies that collect data from natural software-based situations as they really occur in the field, in which the researcher does not manipulate or "control" anything. The course is an end-to-end coverage of the process. We will focus on case studies involving human users in the field. You will actually conduct a field study as part of this course. The course does not cover lab studies.

Recently, I've also taught:

• CS/ECE 507: EECS Professionalism, Ethics, & Diversity (Fall 2016).
• CS 419/519: (HCI 2) Inclusive Design with Personas. This course is now offered every year; starting Fall 2018 its number became CS 468/568.
• CS519: Personas Methods in HCI and User-Centered Design (Winter 2015).
• CS 569/589: Special topics: Empirical lab studies of software development (Winter 2014). This course will cover how you go about designing, preparing for, running, analyzing, and writing-for-publication lab experiments of programming situations involving human subjects. This is an end-to-end coverage of the entire process, and will put you in a position to conduct lab studies of your own with human subjects.
• CS 565: (HCI 1 for grads) Introduction to HCI. This course is offered every year. Here is the 2019 version: http://classes.engr.oregonstate.edu/eecs/spring2019/cs565.
• CS 569: Special topics: Empirical methods for field (case) studies in software engineering (Fall 2014). This course deals with the type of empirical study known as the "case" study. These are studies that collect data from natural software development situations as they really occur in the field, in which the researcher does not manipulate or "control" anything. The course is an end-to-end coverage of the process. We will mainly focus on case studies involving human software developers in the field. You will actually conduct a field study as part of this course. The course does not cover lab studies.
• CS 584 (Fall 2013).
• CS 352: (HCI 1 for undergrads) Usability engineering. Here is Winter 2019's version.

Office Hours

My Winter office hours will be the following, in my personal zoom room (see top of this page), except when the University is not in session:

• Tuesdays, 1:30-2:50
• Fridays, 11:30-12:50
• If you're a student in my current class, see also the Canvas site for the TA's office hours
• Last day of Winter term office hours is Friday March 19.

Exceptions: Occasionally office hours will need to be moved or cancelled due to conflicting events, but I'll try to give you plenty of advance notice. From now thru end of Winter term, the exceptions I know about are:
Tues, Jan. 12: Office hours at a slightly earlier time: 12:30-1:50 that day only
Tues, Jan. 19: Office hours at a slightly earlier time: 12:30-1:50 that day only
Tues, March 16: Office hours moved to: 12:00-1:00 that day only

Graduate Student Mentoring

Here are my current graduate students and postdocs: Andrew Anderson (Ph.D.), Rupika Dikkala (M.S.), Jon Dodge (Ph.D.), Abrar Fallatah (Ph.D., co-advised with Heather Knight)

Recently graduated: Brijesh Bhuva (M.S.), Claudia Hilderbrand (M.S.), Charles Hill (M.S.), Christopher Mendez (M.S.), Bhargav Pandya (M.S.), Sean Penney (M.S.), David Piorkowski (Ph.D.), Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan (Ph.D.)