hello world
News
- 🍾
08/2024
I am officially done! I successfully defended my PhD and will be joining MIT CSAIL as a post-doc in the fall.
Thank you to my amazing advisor, Brad Myers, and committee members Laura Dabbish, Niki Kittur, Elena Glassman, and Andrew Macvean. At MIT, I will be working with David Karger and Arvind Satyanarayan on developer sensemaking and information management with AI.
You can read the full version of my dissertation here.
- 🎉
01/2024
Our CHI paper, "Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information About Code", was accepted -- see you in Hawaii!
The paper was written with co-authors, Brad Myers and Andrew Macvean, and explores automatically collecting, prioritizing, and scaling developer editor traces to help later developers make sense of implementation decisions. Read our pre-print here.
- 👩🎓
10/2023
I'm on the job market! I'm looking for a tenure-track faculty position in HCI and/or software engineering, post-docs, or research scientist roles.
See my full CV here.
Research Interests
Meta-Information for Supporting Developers' Sensemaking
- The subject of my dissertation work is an empirical investigation into what information developers naturally keep track of and tooling solutions to make capturing and sharing this information easier. I have developed a suite of annotation tools that support capturing developer information in-context. This suite includes Adamite, a Chrome extension for annotating developers' online learning materials, and Catseye, a Visual Studio Code extension, which allows developers to keep track of their open development tasks, questions, and more through code annotations. I have also developed a system for supporting developers in authoring long-form documentation, which tracks additional meta-information about the documentation and code relevant to the documentation.
- Meta-Manager: A Tool for Collecting and Exploring Meta Information about Code.Amber Horvath, Andrew Macvean, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in CHI 2024.Read here.
- Support for Long-Form Documentation Authoring and Maintenance.Amber Horvath, Andrew Macvean, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in VL/HCC 2023.Read here.
- Using Annotations for Sensemaking About Code.Amber Horvath, Brad A. Myers, Andrew Macvean, and Imtiaz Rahman.Appeared in UIST 2022.Read here.
- Understanding How Developers Can Use Annotations on Documentation.Amber Horvath, Michael Xieyang Liu, River Hendriksen, Connor Shannon, Emma Paterson, Kazi Jawad, Andrew Macvean, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in CHI 2022.Read here.
API Usability
- My earlier research investigated how developers make sense of complex and unfamiliar APIs. This included understanding how developers form a mental model of an API, and how they discover pertinent functionality. I also collaborated with my peer, Daye Nam, on her work computationally identifying instances of API boilerplate code in open source projects.
- The Long Tail: Understanding the Discoverability of API Functionality.Amber Horvath, Sachin Grover, Sihan Dong, Emily Zhou, Finn Voichick, Mary Beth Kery, Shwetha Shinju, Daye Nam, Mariann Nagy, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in VL/HCC 2019.Read here.
- Methods for Investigating Mental Models For Learners of APIs.Amber Horvath, Mariann Nagy, Finn Voichick, Mary Beth Kery, Brad A. Myers.Appeared in CHI LBW 2019.Read here.
- MARBLE: Mining for Boilerplate Code to Identify API Usability Problems.Daye Nam, Amber Horvath, Andrew Macvean, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in ASE 2019.Read here.
Developer Diversity and Inclusion
- I have had the fortune of working on projects related to broadening participation in computing through understanding systemic inequities, and developing methodologies to uncover biases. Much of this work was done with my peers at Oregon State University, where we developed GenderMag, a methodology to uncover cognitive biases in technology. I have also looked at whether work is completed equitably by subpopulations of developers as part of my 2019 internship at Google.
- Systemic Gender Inequities in Who Reviews Code.Emerson Murphy-Hill, Jillian Dicker, Amber Horvath, Maggie Morrow Hodges, Laurie R. Weingart, Ciera Jaspan, Collin Green, and Nina Chen.Appeared in CSCW 2023.Read here.
- How Gender-Biased Tools Shape Newcomer Experiences in OSS Projects.Susmita Hema Padala, Christopher John Mendez, Luiz Felipe Dias, Igor Steinmacher, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Claudia Hilderbrand, Amber Horvath, Charles Hill, Logan Dale Simpson, Margaret Burnett, Marco Gerosa, Anita Sarma.Appeared in Transactions on Software Engineering.Read here.
- Open Source Barriers to Entry, Revisited: A Sociotechnical Perspective.Chris Mendez, Hema Susmita Padala, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Claudia Hilderbrand, Amber Horvath, Charles Hill, Logan Simpson, Nupoor Patil, Anita Sarma, and Margaret Burnett.Appeared in ICSE 2018.Read here.
- Semi-Automating (or not) a Socio-Technical Method for Socio-Technical Systems.Christopher Mendez, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Alannah Oleson, Amber Horvath, Charles Hill, Claudia Hilderbrand, Anita Sarma, and Margaret Burnett.Appeared in VL/HCC 2018.Read here.
- GenderMag Experiences in the Field: the Whole, the Parts, and The Workload.Charles Hill, Shannon Ernst, Alannah Oleson, Amber Horvath, Margaret Burnett.Appeared in VL/HCC 2016.Read here.
Human-Centered Developer Support
- A lot of my research centers around understanding programmer behavior and designing solutions that take into account these behaviors. This work has involved understanding different types of developers, such as data scientists who manage many different versions of their code while doing exploratory programming, and end user programmers, who are mainly interested in programming as a means to an end.
- Towards Effective Foraging by Data Scientists to Find Past Analysis Choices.Mary Beth Kery, Bonnie John, Patrick O'Flaherty, Amber Horvath, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in CHI 2019.Read here.
- Variolite: Supporting Exploratory Programming by Data Scientists.Mary Beth Kery, Amber Horvath, and Brad A. Myers.Appeared in CHI 2017.Read here.
- General Principles for a Generalized Idea Garden.William Jernigan, Amber Horvath, Michael Lee, Margaret Burnett, Taylor Cuilty, Sandeep Kuttal, Anicia Peters, Irwin Kwan, Faezeh Bahmani, Amy Ko, Christopher J Mendez, and Alannah Oleson.Appeared in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing.Read here.
- A Principled Evaluation for a Principled Idea Garden.Will Jernigan, Amber Horvath, Michael Lee, Margaret Burnett, Taylor Cuilty, Sandeep Kuttal, Anicia Peters, Irwin Kwan, Faezeh Bahmani, and Amy Ko.Appeared in VL/HCC 2015.Read here.
- To Fix or To Learn? How Production Bias Affects Developers' Information Foraging During Debugging.David Piorkowski, Scott D Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi, Margaret Burnett, Irwin Kwan, Austin Z Henley, Jamie Macbeth, Charles Hill, and Amber Horvath.Appeared in ICSME 2015.Read here.
- Principles of a Debugging-First Puzzle Game for Computing Education.Michael J Lee, Faezeh Bahmani, Irwin Kwan, Jilian LaFerte, Polina Charters, Amber Horvath, Fanny Luor, Jill Cao, Catherine Law, Michael Beswetherick, Sheridan Long, Margaret Burnett, Amy J Ko.Appeared in VL/HCC 2014.Read here.
- End-User Programmers in Trouble: Can the Idea Garden Help Them to Help Themselves?.Jill Cao, Irwin Kwan, Faezeh Bahmani, Margaret Burnett, Scott D Fleming, Josh Jordahl, Amber Horvath, and Sherry Yang.Appeared in VL/HCC 2013.Read here.