Web Counter
|
Introduction
I have a PhD from the College
of Computing
at the Georgia Institute of Technology
. I'm a researcher in the areas of
Software Engineering
and Human-Computer Interaction with my advisors Colin
Potts and Spencer
Rugaber. I am currently working as a usability engineer with Microsoft's Office Design Group (9/29/05). My dissertation is available here:
- Software engineering (program comprehension; requirements
engineering; reverse engineering; software evolution; software
design)
- Human-Computer Interaction (computing architectures;
computing ecosystems; usefulness metrics)
- Computing Architectures
- Game Theory and Design
Research Abstract
I have been studying the design of systems through their feature
evolution and by studying their conceptual integrity. I have
been conducting research to answer the following questions:
- How can developers ensure that their systems will be useful to their
users? Can this usefulness be measured in an objective way prior to
system development?
- How do bloat and feature creep manifest themselves in the evolution
of commercial applications? Can new features be evaluated for
potential unwanted interactions and effect on the overall application
design before implementation?
- How does Fred Brook's notion of conceptual integrity manifest
itself in application design, and specifically, with in the features
that an application implements?
I take the position (advanced by Colin Potts) that applications embody
a theory of the world. I believe that by analyzing the concepts and
relationships in this embodied theory, we can begin to understand how
features are implemented, how they contribute to or detract from an
application's usefulness, and how design is affected by the accuracy of
this theory's implementation.
To address these questions, I have developed the metric of conceptual
coherence, the degree to which the concepts in an application are
related to one another, that can serve as a first but crucial
approximation for the conceptual integrity of an application. I have
developed ontological excavation which uses black-box reverse engineering
on the application user interface and services to model the ontology
of an application . I have identified methods from social network analysis
to identify the core concepts, concepts essential to the definition
of that application, and its teleons, tightly related subgroups of
concepts. I have conducted a number of case studies on real applications
to test these methods. I
also show how conceptual coherence can be correlated with the probable
usefulness of an application relative to a particular set of users. To
address the subjective measure of usefulness, I developed use
case silhouetting which measures usefulness as a function of
the conceptual fitness of a set of use cases to the application ontology.
A summary of my thesis can be found here.
My proposal document along with data from my case studies of small
applications can be found here.
- Idris
Hsi, "Measuring the Conceptual Fitness of a Computing
Application in a Computing Ecosystem", Proceedings of the
ACM Workshop on Interdisciplinary Software Engineering Research
(WISER'04) at the 12 Annual Foundations of Software Engineering
(FSE-12), November 5, 2004, pp. 27-36. (33% Acceptance Rate). pdf format
- Idris Hsi, "Analyzing the Conceptual Coherence of Computing
Applications Through Ontological Excavation", PhD Thesis
Proposal, May 13, 2004. pdf
format
- Idris Hsi, Colin Potts, and Melody Moore, "Ontological
Excavation: Unearthing the core concepts of the application",
Proceedings of Tenth Working Conference on Reverse Engineering 2003
(WCRE'03), November 13-16, 2003, pp. 345-352. (42% Acceptance Rate). pdf
format.
- Idris Hsi and Colin Potts, "Studying the Evolution and Enhancement of Software
Features", Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference of Software
Maintenance, San Jose, CA, October 11-14, 2000, IEEE Press, pp.
143-151. in pdf format.
- Michael W. McCracken., Idris Hsi, Heather Richter, Robert
Waters, and Laura Burkhart, "A
Proposed Curriculum for an Undergraduate Software Engineering Degree", CSEE&T
2000-13th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, Austin,
Texas, March 6-8, 2000. in pdf
format
- Colin Potts and Idris Hsi, "Abstraction and Context
in Requirements Engineering: Toward a Synthesis", Annals of Software Engineering,
9: 1-39, 1997.
in pdf format
In Review
-
Idris Hsi, “Analyzing the
Conceptual Integrity of Computing Applications Through Ontological
Excavation”, PhD Thesis, expected February 2005.
-
Idris Hsi, “Ontological
Excavation: A Procedures Manual”, Technical Report,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Dec 2004.
-
Jochen Rick and Idris Hsi (Rick is
60%, Hsi is 40% , "We
Shall Be Hobbits: Beyond the Competitive Mindset", November
5, 2003. Submitted to Journal of the Learning Sciences. In revision. Describes how game theory and models of
collaborative behavior can be used to aid the design of learning
environments. in pdf format
|
