Leading in Research: Khoury College at Conferences
Every year, numerous researchers at Khoury College make transformative contributions to many fields within computer science, collaborating, publishing, leading national and international projects, and participating in top conferences within their specialty areas.
In 2024, Khoury researchers had a prolific conference presence, presenting four or more publications at 16 conferences and attending 100 conferences, the most ever attended by the college — each with the common focus and goal of providing Khoury College researchers the chance to share their groundbreaking work with their peers.
In 2024:
100
Total number of conferences attended by Khoury researchers
233
Total conference publications
253
Number of faculty who published/presented
(83 unique faculty published or presented at a conference in 2024)
Upcoming conference highlights: SIGCSE TS and CHI
At SIGCSE TS and CHI in 2024, almost 40 Northeastern faculty participated, with a combined total of 42 conference publications. As the 2025 conference season gears up, starting with SIGCSE 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from February 26–March 1 and CHI 2025 from April 26–May 1 , take a look at the Khoury-led events and highlights from both.
Khoury College at SIGCSE TS
The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS) is the flagship conference of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).
View the schedule for this year’s Khoury faculty-led events below or download a PDF, including a panel on February 28 with Jonathan Mwaura, winner of the ACM SIGCSE Broadening Participation in Computing Education Award for 2025. Additional highlights from the conference will be shared as they become available.
Khoury-led events at SIGCSE 2025
(bolded names indicate Khoury faculty)
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Affiliated event: Professional Development Pre-Symposium Event for Teaching-Track Faculty
8:30–3 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty lead: Scott Valcourt (participant)
Affiliated event: Annual MS Pathways to Computing Consortium Convening
1–5 p.m.; meeting rooms 315-316
Faculty leads: Caitlin Kidder, Elizabeth Hawthorne, Jodi Tims
Affiliated event: Equitable Grading Community of Practice Meeting
1 –5 p.m.; meeting rooms 310-311
Faculty lead: Ghita Amor (volunteer mentor)
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Poster: Simulating Requirement Elicitation: Development and Evaluation of a Persona-Based Tool
10 a.m.–12 p.m.; exhibit hall C
Faculty lead: Ildar Akhmetov, Mirjana Prpa
Parsa Rajabi (Presenter)
BoF: Hispanics in Computing
12:45–1:35 p.m.; meeting room 327
Faculty leads: Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Alvaro Monge, Oscar Veliz, Patricia Ordóñez, Brianna Posadas
CS1 TAs
1:45–3 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty lead: Scott Valcourt (chair)
Paper: Does Reducing Curricular Complexity Impact Student Success in Computer Science?
1:45–3 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty leads: Sumukhi Ganesan, Albert Lionelle, Catherine Gill, Carla Brodley
Paper: Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Dynamic Programming Concept Inventory
3:45–4:05 p.m.; meeting rooms 310-311
Faculty leads: Matthew Ferland, Varun Nagaraj Rao, Arushi Arora, Drew van der Poel, Michael Luu, Randy Huynh, Frederick Reiber, Sandra Ossman, Seth Poulsen, Michael Shindler
Panel: Addressing Challenges in Teaching-Track Faculty Promotion
3:45–5:01 p.m.; meeting rooms 319-321
Faculty leads: Christine Alvarado, Nate Derbinsky, Sarah Heckman, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Harini Ramaprasad, Mark Sherriff
Paper: An MS in CS for non-CS Majors: A Ten-Year Retrospective
3:45–4:05 p.m.; meeting rooms 315-316
Faculty leads: Logan Schmidt, Caitlin J. Kidder, Ildar Akhmetov, Megan Bebis, Alan C. Jamieson, Albert Lionelle, Sarah Maravetz, Sami Rollins, Ethan Selinger
Paper: Student Application Trends for Teaching Assistant Positions
4–4:20 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty leads: Felix Muzny, Abdulaziz Suria, Carla Brodley
BoF: Teaching Track Faculty in Computer Science
5:30–6:20 p.m.; meeting room 327
Faculty leads: Olga Glebova, Chris Gregg, Melinda McDaniel, Laney Strange
BoF: Launching and Enhancing Summer Bridge Program
5:30–6:20 p.m.; meeting room 407
Faculty leads: Abby O’Neill, Stella Kaval, Mallika Reddy, Alvaro Monge, Colleen M. Lewis, Narges Norouzi
BoF: SIGCSE’s Committee on Expanding the Women-In-Computing Community Fine Tunes Support and Encouragement
6:30–7:20 p.m.; meeting room 407
Faculty leads: Gloria Townsend, Wendy Powley, Lindsay Jamieson, Jodi Tims, Beth Hawthorne
Friday, February 28, 2025
Panel: The Future of CS Education (award for Broadening Participation in Computing Education)
9–10 a.m.; Spirit of Pittsburgh Ballroom
Faculty lead: Jonathan Mwaura
Paper: Examining Teamwork: Evaluating Individual Contributions in Collaborative Software Engineering Projects
1:45–3 p.m.; meeting rooms 403-405
Faculty lead: Joydeep Mitra, Eric Gerber
Live demonstration: Gamification of Computer Science Algorithms
3–3:45 p.m.; exhibit hall C
Faculty leads: Lama Hamandi, Hla Htoo, Senay Tilahun, Haider Amin
Poster: Evaluating GenAI’s Effectiveness for Students with Varied Programming Backgrounds in a Software Development Course
3–5 p.m.; Exhibit Hall C
Faculty leads: Houda Bouamor, Gabriella Gongora-Svartzman, Larry Heimann, Shihong Huang
CS1 Teaching Practices
3:45–5 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty lead: Eric Gerber (chair)
Saturday, March 1, 2025
Poster: Does ABET Accreditation Influence the Representation of Women in CS Programs?
10 a.m.–12 p.m.; exhibit hall C
Faculty leads: Stefanie Colino Dube, Albert Lionelle
Instructor-Written Hints as Automated Test Suite Quality Feedback
10:45 a.m.–12 p.m.; meeting rooms 317-318
Faculty leads: James Perretta, Andrew DeOrio, Arjun Guha, Jonathan Bell
Systems [Online]
10:45 a.m.–12 p.m.; meeting rooms 302-303
Faculty lead: Alan Jamieson (chair)
Highlights from 2024
The 2024 SIGCSE TS featured 18 Khoury researchers showcasing 14 unique presentations, including a Best Paper winner:
Quantitative Approaches to Understanding BPC Efforts: Does Curricular Complexity in Computer Science Influence the Representation of Women CS Graduates?
Authors: Albert Lionelle, Carla Brodley, Catherine Gill, and McKenna Quam
Inspired by the methodology of previous papers investigating the inverse relationship between curricular complexity and program quality, researchers investigated the relationship between curricular complexity and the representation of women earning CS degrees by creating curricular maps of 60 computer science degrees and calculating measures such as program complexity, course blocking, delay factor, and total math/CS credits to understand complexity’s correlation with the representation of women CS majors.
Northeastern University and Khoury College at CHI
The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of human-computer interaction, and in 2024, it showcased a record 28 papers, late-breaking works, panels, special interest groups, and other events from Khoury College researchers along with their collaborators across Northeastern. Highlights from 2024 include:
Best Paper
Sensible and Sensitive AI for Worker Wellbeing: Factors that Inform Adoption and Resistance for Information Workers
Authors: Vedant Das Swain (Khoury distinguished post-doctoral fellow); Gregory D. Aboud (College of Engineering dean, professor, and Khoury courtesy appointee); Lan Gao, Abhirup Mondal, Munmun De Choudhury
Algorithmic estimations of worker behavior are gaining popularity. Passive Sensing–enabled AI (PSAI) systems leverage behavioral traces from workers’ digital tools to infer their experience. Despite their conceptual promise, the practical designs of these systems elicit tensions that lead to workers resisting adoption. This paper teases apart the monolithic representation of PSAI by investigating system components that maximize value and mitigate concerns.
Two honorable mentions
Barriers to Photosensitive Accessibility in Virtual Reality, a study on the risks and issues of VR technology for people with photosensitive epilepsy and recommendations for low-cost safety improvements, with three Khoury researchers among its authors: Laura South, Caglar Yildirim, and Michelle A. Borkin.
Odds and Insights: Decision Quality in Exploratory Data Analysis Under Uncertainty, in which researchers (including Khoury professor Michael Correll) performed a crowdsourced study to measure decision-making quality in visual analytics.
ACM CHI 2025 is scheduled from April 26 – May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. Details for the 2025 conference, including a full listing and schedule of Khoury research being presented, will be shared as information becomes available.