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
- Sept 2022: Very honored to have just received the "Most Influential Paper Award" at IEEE VL/HCC'22, for the long-term impact of our paper from 2011: Modeling Programmer Navigation: A head-to-head empirical evaluation of predictive models, by David Piorkowski, Scott D. Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi, Liza John, Christopher Bogart, Bonnie E. John, Margaret Burnett, Rachel Bellamy.
- May 2022: I'm proud to have received the 2022 IEEE CS TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Leadership Award. The award was presented at the ACM/IEEE ICSE conference.
- Feb. 2022: I'm an ACM Distinguished Speaker again. If you would like me to give a talk on GenderMag, SocioEconomicMag, or the InclusiveMag family of inclusive design methods (and you meet ACM's other criteria), ACM will pay for my airfare to do so.
- 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.
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 has served in over 50 conference organization and program committee roles.
She is also on the Academic Alliance Emeritus Chairs Council
of the National Center for Women In Technology (NCWIT).
Recent talks
More Information
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:
Fall 2022:
- CS 468/568: (HCI 2) Inclusive Design with Personas. MW 10:00-11:50 (KEC 1001). This course is offered every year. Here is the class website.
Winter 2022:
- CS 564: Field Studies in SE and HCI. Current class website: http://classes.engr.oregonstate.edu/eecs/winter2023/cs564
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. (Super-old, pre-Canvas version to give an idea.) The course does not cover lab studies. NOTE: This course is offered at most every 2nd year, so if you need this course, this is your opportunity to take it.
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 564: FIELD STUDIES IN SE AND HCI (Winter 2021).
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.
- CS 584 (Fall 2013).
- CS 352: (HCI 1 for undergrads) Usability engineering.
Here is Winter 2019's pre-Canvas version.
Office Hours
My Winter term office hours will be the following, in my office and simultaneously in my personal zoom room (see top of this page), except when the University is not in session or when I'm out of town:
- Mondays 10-11
- Fridays 3-4:30
- If you're a student in my current class, see also the Canvas site for the TA's office hours
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:
MLK Day (university not in session)
Graduate Student Mentoring
Here are my current graduate students and postdocs:
Puja Agarwal (M.S.), Andrew Anderson (Ph.D.), Chimdi Chikezie (M.S.),
Abrar Fallatah (Ph.D.), Rosalinda Garcia (M.S.), Md Montaser Hamid (Ph.D.)
Recently graduated: Brijesh Bhuva (M.S.), Rupika Dikkala (M.S.), Jonathan Dodge (Ph.D.), Claudia Hilderbrand (M.S.), Christopher Mendez (M.S.),
David Piorkowski (Ph.D.), Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan (Ph.D.)
Where do my grad students and postdocs end up?
- Nine became professors at various colleges and universities.
- Two are researchers in academic research institutes or industrial research labs (Carnegie-Mellon, IBM Research).
- The rest of my PhD students and postdocs (and some of my MS students too) have become senior UX (User Experience) researchers at companies like Google and Microsoft.
- Most of the rest of my MS students became software developers, tech company administrators/gurus, and/or went on to get more degrees that brought them into positions in areas like business or aviation.
Jan. 11, 2023
