Christopher Bogart

I received an MS in computer science in 1992, then worked as a software engineer in Boulder and Denver, CO, for 15 years before returning to school at Oregon State to pursue a doctorate. I enjoy the work of software engineering, but I was motivated to move into academic research by a desire to improve the tools I was using.

My dissertation research involved studying the work practices of scientific modelers (specifically cognitive modelers: psychologists who model cognition in order to understand human behavior). My approach involves designing a tool that can capture and make explicit the changing, task-specific "evaluation abstractions" that are implicit in a modeler's exploration of model output. The research has involved qualitative and quantitative empirical methods, language design, and implementation of an experimental tool (an Eclipse plugin implemented in Scala) to support modelers at the Air Force Research Laboratory who use the ACT-R and RML cognitive modeling languages.

My current research focuses on studying coordination, allocation of effort, diffusion of practices, and skill learning among software developers, with the goal of improving the sustainability of open-source infrastructure and growing and diversifying the workforce of CS and IT professionals. I use data mining techniques to study software developers in real-world projects and in the classroom, complemented by interviews and surveys. Most recently I have been investigating ways to measure and improve the effectiveness of project-based learning techniques in online computer science education.