FSU’s Computer Science faculty member Sonia Haiduc was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The award totals $494,989 over a duration of 5 years and will allow Dr. Haiduc to study and improve the use and production of programming video tutorials. The outcomes of this project have the potential to transform the way programmers and computer science students acquire knowledge from video tutorials, allowing them to easily access quality information that is easy to extract and use in their own contexts. The work under this project will allow professional programmers to leverage online documentation more efficiently and find help for their coding tasks faster, which can lead to time and effort savings and decreased software costs. The project also aims to support better learning and instruction out of the classroom, by improving access to the knowledge captured in high-quality video tutorials, and therefore supporting students in complementing their classroom learning experience. The grant will also support the organization of a Scratch summer coding camp for middle schoolers for four years starting in Summer 2020.
Dr. Sonia Haiduc joined FSU in fall 2013. She obtained her PhD and M.Sc. from Wayne State University in 2013 and 2009, respectively. Her research interests are in software engineering, and in particular in software maintenance and evolution, program comprehension, and software documentation. She advises several PhD students and M.Sc. students, and works with several undergraduate students. Her research has been published in top journals and conferences in the field of software engineering and she is the recipient of several NSF grants. Her students are the recipients of several international research awards, such as an ACM Distinguished Paper Award and a Gold and a Silver Medal in ACM Graduate Research Competitions. She is also actively involved in the organization and review process of several conferences and journals.
Added July 2019: See FSU’s official article recognizing Sonia and the other faculty winners here: https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2019/07/22/early-career-faculty-members-recognized-with-prestigious-nsf-awards/