Program comprehension research can be characterized by both the theories that provide rich explanations about how programmers comprehend software, as well as the tools that are used to assist in comprehension tasks. During this talk I will review some of the key cognitive theories of program comprehension that have emerged over the past thirty years. Using these theories as a canvas, I will the...

Chinese characters can be compared to a molecular structure: a character is analogous to a molecule, radicals are like atoms, calligraphic strokes correspond to elementary particles, and when characters form compounds, they are like molecular structures. In chemistry the conjunction of all of these structural levels produces what we perceive as matter. In language, the conjunction of strokes, r...

There has been a lot of excitement in the last few decades over the interaction between algebraic geometry and theoretical physics. Much of it can be bewildering to students and researchers alike as they try to navigate physics jargon and what often seems like strangely motivated constructions and questions. In this talk I will give a users guide to understanding some of the questions, objects,...

This study was a qualitative exploration of the effect of multiple-choice glosses and periodic second language (L2) text reconstruction on lexical acquisition. L2 readers of German engaged in a think-aloud procedure while reading a short text and retelling its content in German after each of four short sections. In each section, four unfamiliar target words (TWs) were embedded. Half of the part...

For the past two decades linguists working within the framework of systemic functional linguistics have been developing appraisal theory as a tool for analysing evaluation in discourse. In this talk I will present a brief overview of the current model and then move on to address a number of the challenges that have arisen over the years including distinguishing inscribed from invoked attitude, ...

Previous studies have examined the online research behaviors of graduate students in terms of how they seek and retrieve research-related information on the Web across diverse disciplines. However, few have focused on graduate students’ searching activities, and particularly for their research tasks. Drawing on Kuiper, Volman, and Terwel’s (2008) three aspects of web literacy skills (searching,...

The AdS/CFT conjecture states that to every such manifold (L, gL) there is a dual superconformal field theory in four dimensions. This may be thought of as living on the Penrose conformal boundary of anti–de Sitter space, in the usual way. The AdS/CFT correspondence then makes some remarkable connections between field theory and geometry, some of which I have uncovered over the last year or so....

This paper examines the composing processes of a learner of modern Greek from two different perspectives, that of a strategies researcherand that of the writer herself. The researcher uses established typologies to examine the data, and the writer produces a ‘thick’ analysis of the same material. The main aim of the study was to juxtapose these two separate analyses in order to evaluate the dif...

As advanced analytics has become more mainstream in enterprises, usability and system-managed performance optimizations are critical for its wide adoption. As a result, there is an active interest in the design of declarative languages in several analytics areas. In this talk I will describe the efforts in IBM around three areas namely Information Extraction, Entity Resolution and Machine Learn...

In this talk I will discuss the analysis of several semantic phenomena that need meaning representations that can describe attributes of propositional contexts. I will do this in a version of Discourse Representation Theory, using a universal semantic tagset developed as part of a project that aims to produce a large meaning bank (a semantically-annotated corpus) for four languages (English, Du...