Our lab looks at how real programmers use programming languages. To do this, we analyze hundreds of thousands of open-source software repositories hosted on GitHub, the world’s largest open-source software forge. Our goal is to understand what developers do with programming languages, what features they tend to use and how they use them, and try to provide concrete data to support the design of future programming languages.
Advisor Name: | Robert Dyer | |
Email: | rdyer@unl.edu | |
Website: | https://go.unl.edu/rdyer | |
Advisor College: | Engineering | |
Advisor Department: | School of Computing | |
Potential Student Tasks: | Responsibilities include reading about recent research in the field, designing research questions (with the help of a graduate student), writing Python code to analyze hundreds of thousands of open-source software repositories (from GitHub), applying data science techniques to analyze the data, and writing the results in a research conference paper. We will have a weekly progress meeting to answer any questions and plan out the work for the following week. | |
Student Qualifications: | There is no expectations for any specific technical skills, though most of our research tends to utilize the Python language. The qualifications we do look for are excellent communication skills, a strong work ethic, and a curious mind—someone who likes to learn new things and seeks out the unknown. | |
Training, Mentoring, and Workplace Community: | Our lab works both in person and remote, and we are quite flexible with working around student schedules. I find it best to pair FYRE students with graduate students on research projects. Our lab has an online Slack workspace, so if there are any questions (any time of day) students can always seek help from myself or other students in the lab. | |
Available Positions | 2 |
Look forward to hearing from you!