Derek Richardson

Organizational Bio

Wide-eyed, outside of Dr. Hubert Dreyfus's door at Berkeley - 2007

I am a Masters student in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. I am also a Systems Analyst III in the Academic and Research Technology Directorate of the Office of Information Technology at Georgia Tech. I started the Masters program in January 2007 and my employment with GT in September 2006.

Prior to moving (back) to Atlanta, I spent four years as a Senior Software Engineer at Appian, a leading Business Process Management software firm.

I grew up in Atlanta, attending Sagamore Hills Elementary, Pace Academy , and Emory University before graduating Summa Cum Laude from the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University in 2002 with a BBA in Computer Information Systems. I worked my way through GSU as a software developer (I had not yet earned the title Software Engineer. Despite lack of certification standards in the industry, I think that I can now claim to be an engineer, even, perhaps, a helluva engineer. I have, however, been a ramblin' wreck for years.).

I am currently exploring opportunities for PhD studies in various programs congruent with my research interests.

Research Interests

I am interested in the intersection of software engineering and cognitive science - specifically, the cognitive processes involved in performing software engineering. This is very broad, so let me illustrate with a few examples:

I am interested in expertise in software engineering and how it is gained. I wonder about what makes novices novices and experts experts. I lay awake at night trying to figure out how some novices become experts and other novices fail to make the transition. I started out looking for ways to apply the Dreyfus Model of Directed Skill Acquisition (the single "Dreyfus" represents both Hubert and Stuart) to software engineering. I have now become very interested in K. Anders Ericsson's expert-performance approach to studying skill and skill acquisition. In my opinion, it picks up where the Dreyfus Model leaves off and extends it to investigate why most people plateau at a adequate level of skill but a few keep moving past it to true expertise.
I am interested in how software engineers work with their tools, an aspect of HCI. I am interested in making software engineering tools that are a better fit for human cognitive processes. I am also interested in making software engineers that are a better fit for their tools (yes, my tongue is in my cheek a bit as I say this) - an aspect of the novice/expert problem.
I am interested in how software engineers work together in teams to write and evolve large software systems. Once again, my focus is largely on the novice/expert problem - if/how novices and experts can work on the same teams to each others benefits and to the benefit of the development process. How can we engineer software development organizations to accommodate both novices and experts, support them in working productively together, and facilitate the novices' progressions towards expertise?

So much for my domain of interest. Techniques? If you visited this page before, you may have read about my interest in cognitive modeling. While that is still an interest, I have realized that much preliminary work must be done before thinking about models. Currently, I am simply striving to define expertise in a way that can be operationalized in assessment instruments that measure expertise, primarily in software design. Following the expert-performance approach, once I have an assessment instrument that can differentiate novices and experts, I will look at novices and experts to see how they solve problems. Once I know the activities that experts engage in that novices do not, I'll study how the experts acquired the propensity and ability to act in those ways. At this point, it will become possible to design educational interventions based on this knowledge and, perhaps, to look at cognitive models that can explain the descriptive results of all previous study.

Lab Affiliation

I work in the Design Intelligence Laboratory at Georgia Tech led by Dr. Ashok Goel, my advisor. We are investigating the automatic adaption of software agents based on models annotated with functional and teleological specifications. Although I am currently on sabbatical from the lab to complete Ph.D. program and fellowship applications, we are planning to study the usability of various TMK and TMKL notations for designers beginning Spring 2008, when I return.

I also work with W. Michael McCracken, Principal Research Scientist in the College of Computing, to study expertise. We are planning to conduct studies to measure actual expertise, which is performance on representative, authentic tasks, and compare that to sociological proxies for actual expertise, such as years of experience and reputation. Most existing software programming and design research has used sociological proxies. However, there are experimental results both from other fields and from software design itself that indicate these proxies are not always accurate. We will investigate whether measuring actual expertise can improve the quality of studies of software design expertise.

Publications

None yet.

Unpublished Work

None yet available.

Courses

Fall 2007: CS 8893, Special Topics in Cognitive Science: Culture and Cognition, with Dr. Nancy J. Nersessian.
Spring 2007: CS 6795, Introduction to Cognitive Science, with Dr. Ashok Goel.

As an undergraduate at Georgia State University, I took two particularly relevant, graduate-level courses:

Intelligent Systems: Development and Use with Dr. Balasubramaniam Ramesh of the Computer Information Systems Department.
Data Mining with Dr. Satish Nargundkar of the Decision Sciences department.

Professional Affiliations

Curriculum Vitae

As of July 15, 2007.

Contact Information

I am a LinkedIn member, so I always welcome contacts through other people I know.

You may reach me at my first name + '.' + my last name at 'gatech' in the 'edu' TLD, if you think your mail will catch my fancy.

Colophon

This document was initially hand-crafted in emacs on a MacBook Pro under OS X while in California on vacation. I'm a software engineer, not a web designer, so address any graphic design complaints to /dev/null.

Updated: September 2007
Published: May 2007