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Software engineering bots - automated tools that handle tedious tasks - are increasingly used by industrial and open source projects to improve developer productivity. Current research in this area is held back by a lack of consensus of…

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex tasks is challenging, often involving a time-consuming and uncontrollable prompt engineering process. This paper introduces a novel human-LLM interaction framework, Low-code LLM. It…

While previous work exists on how to conduct and disseminate insights from problem-driven visualization projects and design studies, the literature does not address how to accomplish these goals in transdisciplinary teams in ways that…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at understanding and generating video descriptions but their high memory, computation, and deployment demands hinder practical use particularly for blind and low-vision (BLV) users who depend on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as coding assistants, capable of generating source code from natural language prompts. With the increasing adoption of LLMs in software development, academic research and industry based projects are…

Cooking is a vital yet challenging activity for people with visual impairments (PVI). It involves tasks that can be dangerous or difficult without vision, such as handling a knife or adding a suitable amount of salt. A better understanding…

When writing software code, developers typically prioritise functionality over security, either consciously or unconsciously through biases and heuristics. This is often attributed to tangible pressures such as client requirements, but…

Bug fixing is a complex and time-consuming task in software development. Bug localization research tends to focus on the accuracy of automated tools that suggest source code files for developers to look at. However, little is known about…

Design studies aim to create visualization solutions for real-world problems of different application domains. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities to enhance the design study process,…

Customization is crucial for making visualizations accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) people with widely-varying needs. But what makes for usable or useful customization? We identify four design goals for how BLV people should be able…

NLP models today strive for supporting multiple languages and modalities, improving accessibility for diverse users. In this paper, we evaluate their multilingual, multimodal capabilities by testing on a visual reasoning task. We observe…

Background: The software engineering community has increasingly conducted systematic literature reviews (SLR) as a means to summarize evidence from different studies and bring to light the state of the art of a given research topic. While…

With the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), an increasing number of open-source software projects are using LLMs as their core functional component. Although research and practice on LLMs are capturing considerable interest, no…

Creativity is fundamentally human. As AI takes on more of the generative work that once required human imagination, despite documented limitations in creative ability, a critical question emerges: How does GenAI affect users' creativity?…

Burnout affects software developers' mental and physical well-being and contributes to turnover, generating strong concerns in the software industry. Prior research has shown that lack of belonging is associated with higher levels of…

Retaining diverse, underrepresented students in computer science and software engineering programs is a significant concern for universities. In this chapter, we describe the INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact program at the University of…

Language provides a natural interface to specify and evaluate performance on visual tasks. To realize this possibility, vision language models (VLMs) must successfully integrate visual and linguistic information. Our work compares VLMs to a…

Understanding and managing data privacy in the digital world can be challenging for sighted users, let alone blind and low-vision (BLV) users. There is limited research on how BLV users, who have special accessibility needs, navigate data…

Program comprehension concerns the ability of an individual to make an understanding of an existing software system to extend or transform it. Software systems comprise of data that are noisy and missing, which makes program understanding…

This chapter presents, from our research on inclusive software within the context of a diversity and inclusion based STEM program at the University of Victoria, INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact (hereafter Inspire). In a society with an ever…