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)
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-affiliated 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).
Highlights from the 2025 conference included:
The Future of CS Education (award for Broadening Participation in Computing Education), a panel led by Jonathan Mwaura, winner of the ACM SIGCSE Broadening Participation in Computing Education Award for 2025.
Best Paper winner: An MS in CS for Non-CS Majors: A Ten-Year Retrospective
Authors: Logan W. Schmidt, Caitlin J. Kidder, Ildar Akhmetov, Megan Bebis, Alan C. Jamieson, Albert Lionelle, Sarah Maravetz, Sami Rollins, Ethan Selinger
For the last 10 years, Northeastern University has offered a two-semester bridge into a master’s in computer science for people with undergraduate degrees in non-computing disciplines. The bridge program has over 2,000 currently enrolled students with more than 50% women every year since 2020, and domestic enrollment has increased relative to direct-entry master’s students. Our data show that bridge students, including those with non-STEM backgrounds, perform comparably to direct-entry students in terms of GPA and job outcomes.
Other Khoury-affiliated SIGCSE 2025 works
Instructor-Written Hints as Automated Test Suite Quality Feedback
Authors: James Perretta, Andrew DeOrio, Arjun Guha, Jonathan Bell
Examining Teamwork: Evaluating Individual Contributions in Collaborative Software Engineering Projects
Authors: Joydeep Mitra, Eric Gerber
Does Reducing Curricular Complexity Impact Student Success in Computer Science?
Authors: Sumukhi Ganesan, Albert Lionelle, Catherine Gill, Carla Brodley
Gamification of Computer Science Algorithms (live demonstration)
Authors: Lama Hamandi, Hla Htoo, Senay Tilahun, Haider Amin
Does ABET Accreditation Influence the Representation of Women in CS Programs?
Authors: Stefanie Colino Dube, Albert Lionelle
Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Dynamic Programming Concept Inventory
Authors: Matthew Ferland, Varun Nagaraj Rao, Arushi Arora, Drew van der Poel, Michael Luu, Randy Huynh, Frederick Reiber, Sandra Ossman, Seth Poulsen, Michael Shindler
Addressing Challenges in Teaching-Track Faculty Promotion
Authors: Christine Alvarado, Nate Derbinsky, Sarah Heckman, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Harini Ramaprasad, Mark Sherriff
Simulating Requirement Elicitation: Development and Evaluation of a Persona-Based Tool
Authors: Ildar Akhmetov, Mirjana Prpa
Evaluating GenAI’s Effectiveness for Students with Varied Programming Backgrounds in a Software Development Course
Authors: Houda Bouamor, Gabriella Gongora-Svartzman, Larry Heimann, Shihong Huang
Highlights from 2024 SIGCSE TS
The 2024 conference 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.