Gender-Inclusive Software and Beyond - SICSA Guest Seminar by Margaret Burnett

About

We are pleased to announce Margaret Burnett, Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will deliver a guest seminar during her visit to University of Glasgow.  The seminar will be hybrid and is open to all; we ask that students and academic colleagues register with their University email address.

Title

Gender-Inclusive Software and Beyond

Abstract

How can software professionals (e.g., developers, HCI professionals, product managers) assess whether their software supports diverse users? And if they find problems, how can they fix them? We begin with a summary of GenderMag, a systematic inspection method for finding and fixing “gender inclusivity bugs" -- biases against different genders in software interfaces and workflows. We then explain an advanced method, InclusiveMag — a meta-method that can be used by HCI researchers to generate systematic inclusiveness inspection methods analogous to GenderMag, but for other dimensions of diversity. Finally, we show how members of the InclusiveMag family can be systematically composed and decomposed, thereby enabling HCI practitioners without resources/skills for full intersectional research to still bring intersectional HCI practices to the technology products they are building.

Bio

Margaret Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, with a research focus on diverse people who are using technology while engaged in some form of problem-solving. She co-leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments; just introduced an analytical approach to intersectional HCI; and is now introducing SocioeconomicMag for improving technology’s socioeconomic inclusiveness. She co-founded the area of end-user software engineering, which aims to improve software creation/customization for diverse computer users not trained in programming. Also, in collaboration with Simone Stumpf and others, she contributed unique, seminal work on explaining AI to ordinary computer users. Her recent paper bringing inclusive design perspectives to Human-AI interaction just won an ACM TiiS Best Paper of 2024 award. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, winner of the 2023 Grace Hopper Conference’s ABIE Tech Leader Award, and an award-winning mentor.

Systems and Software Mailing list 

To receive emails about similar events, subscribe to the SICSA System and Software Engineering mailing list: https://sicsa.ac.uk/contact/