DEVELOPER BEHAVIOR
Software engineers are frequently faced with decisions in their work, and the choices developers make have a major impact on the technology we use everyday. Unfortunately, programmers often make bad decisions and avoid beneficial behaviors such as adopting development tools, refactoring, testing, and adhering to security guidelines while developing software. The goal of this work is to explore ways to improve the decision-making and behavior of software engineers by using interdisciplinary concepts, such as nudge theory in behavioral science, as a lens to analyze developer behavior and apply these ideas to software engineering.

AUTOMATED SE
The process of designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining software is becoming more challenging as software applications increase in size, functionality, and complexity. To support software engineers in their work, we aim develop bots and automated tools to increase developer productivity and use automation to improve programming tasks such as testing, code reviews, refactoring, CI/CD, and more. Not only do we investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of SE bots, but also aim to evaluate the design of these systems to discover their impact for influencing adoption and the behavior of programmers.

DARK PATTERNS
Dark patterns are deceptive user interface designs in HCI that often trick users into adopting unfavorable behaviors online. For example, deceiving users to share more personal data or purchase more items than originally intended. The goal of this project is to discover ways to automatically detect dark patterns in user interfaces and encourage developers to avoid incorporating these dishonest and misleading designs in their code. Alternatively, we also plan to explore if dark patterns can be used for good as a way to improve human behavior while interacting with technology.

TECHNICAL INTERVIEWS
The first step to becoming a software engineer is passing the technical interview, an assessment where candidates solve a programming problem in front of a hiring committee. Research shows there are many problems with technical interviews, including stressed out participants and discrimination against qualified candidates, as well as inconcisistent and time-consuming evaluations for employers. For this project, we aim to examine ways to improve the hiring process in software engineering by reducing stress for candidates and improving evaluations for companies while providing a clear assessment of developers' skills.

SE EDUCATION
Despite growing enrollment in Computer Science courses, the retention rate in computing classes is decreasing. One of the primary reasons for this high attrition rate is poor programming behaviors from students on coding assignments and projects. To encourage students follow better programming practices, we aim to develop tools and techniques to help students adopt better software engineering behaviors in programming courses with the goals of improving their programming skills, increasing retention in CS, and to better prepare students for future careers in technology as the next generation of software engineers.