Thomas LaToza

Thomas LaToza

Assistant Professor and Lab Director

I study how humans interact with code and design new ways to build software. I work at the intersection of software engineering and human-computer interaction.

I use behavioral methods to study developers as users of their programming tools, understand what makes designing, implementing, and debugging software hard, and re-envision the relationship between developers and code. A key focus of my work has been designing new techniques to view and manipulate code. I have pioneered the design of crowdsourced programming environments, which reify developer’s design knowledge, strategies, and mental models in explicit forms which can be manipulated by program analysis tools and connected to code.

Publications

  1. "Crowdsourced Behavior-Driven Development", Emad Aghayi, Thomas D. LaToza, Paurav Surendra, Seyedmeysam Abolghasemi, Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), 2021
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  2. "Can microtask programming work in industry?", Shinobu Saito, Yukako Iimura, Emad Aghayi, Thomas D. LaToza, ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Industry Papers Track (ESEC/FSE-IP), 2020
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  3. "RulePad: Interactive Authoring of Checkable Design Rules", Sahar Mehrpour, Thomas D. LaToza, Hamed Sarvari, ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), 2020
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  4. "Using Hypotheses as a Debugging Aid", Abdulaziz Alaboudi, Thomas D. LaToza, 2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2020
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  5. "Find Unique Usages: Helping Developers Understand Common Usages", Emad Aghayi, Aaron Massey, Thomas D. LaToza, 2020 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2020
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  6. "Explicit programming strategies", Thomas D. LaToza, Maryam Arab, Dastyni Loksa, Amy J. Ko, Empirical Software Engineering, 2020
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  7. "An Exploratory Study of Live-Streamed Programming", Abdulaziz Alaboudi, Thomas D. LaToza, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2019
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  8. "Editable AI: Mixed Human-AI Authoring of Code Patterns", Kartik Chugh, Andrea Solis, Thomas D. LaToza, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2019
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  9. "Active Documentation: Helping Developers Follow Design Decisions", Sahar Mehrpour, Thomas D. LaToza, Rahul K. Kindi, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2019
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  10. "Supporting Software Engineering Research and Education by Annotating Public Videos of Developers Programming", Abdulaziz Alaboudi, Thomas D. LaToza, International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2019
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