Thomas D. LaToza

 

Work Address

Institute for Software Research

School of Computer Science

Carnegie Mellon University

5000 Forbes Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA  15213

tlatoza@cs.cmu.edu

 

Home Address

5521 Hobart Street

Pittsburgh, PA  15217

 

 

Research Interests

 

Empirical studies of programmers, human computer interaction, machine learning, code navigation, science of design, aspect oriented programming, modularity, mining software repositories

 

 

Education

 

Ph.D. student, Software Engineering, Institute for Software Research International, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, August 2004 – Present.

Coursework: HCI Process & Theory; What makes good research in software engineering?; Analysis of Software Artifacts; Modeling Dynamic Software Architectures; Machine Learning; Context Aware Computing; Multimedia Databases and Data Mining; Web Commerce, Security, and Privacy, Into to Econometric Theory

Advisor: Prof. Brad A. Myers

 

B.S., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2004 (with highest honors).

 

B.S., Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2004 (magna cum laude, with distinction in psychology).

 

 

Publications

LaToza, T.D., Garlan, D., Herblseb, J.D., and Myers, B.A.  (2007).  Program Comprehension as Fact Finding.  To appear in Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE).

LaToza, T.D., Venolia, G., & DeLine, R. (2006).  Maintaining Mental Models: A Study of Developer Work Habits.  In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

Venolia, G., DeLine, R., and LaToza, T. Software Development at Microsoft Observed: It's about people ... working together.  Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-140. October 2005.

LaToza, T.D., & Kirlik, A.  (2004).  The understanding and modification of procedural and Object-Oriented programs – when does knowledge help more?  Psychology Department, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Undergraduate Thesis.

Goldberg, D.E., Sastry, K, & LaToza, T.  (2001).  On the supply of building blocks.  Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, San Francisco, CA, July 7 – 11, 336-342.

 

 

Professional Experience

 

Microsoft Research                                                      May 2005 – August 2005

Intern, Human Interactions in Programming

Conducted interviews and surveys of Microsoft developers exploring work habits, code ownership, communication mechanisms, tool usage, interruptions, documentation, and code clones.

 

Microsoft                                                                     June 2004 – August 2004

Software Design Engineer Intern, Media Center

Worked on replacing reflection with code generation for Media Center GUI descriptions.

 

Microsoft                                                                     May 2003 – August 2003

Software Design Engineer Intern, Media Center

Built an extensible Studio environment for authoring and debugging Media Center pages interactively at run time with reflection.

 

Microsoft                                                                     May 2002 – August 2002

Software Design Engineer Intern, Publisher

Implemented Textbox default attributes, sectioning of startup catalog templates, and bug fixes for Publisher 2003.

 

Microsoft                                                                    May 2001 – August 2001

Software Design Engineer in Test Intern, Encarta

Researched, specified, and implemented web service performance stress testing and reporting tools for Microsoft FactFinder.

 

UNETY Systems                                                          June 2000 – August 2000

CORE Intern

Rebuilt quote generation and itemized order tracking system for a database driven Intranet web application.

 

 

Selected Honors

 

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2005 - Present)

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention (2004)

Psychology Honors Program (2003-4)

Phi Kappa Phi (2003)

Accenture Outstanding Student Award (2002, 2003)

Tau Beta Pi (2001)

Alpha Lambda Delta (2001)

James Scholar (2000 – 2004)

Krishna Bharadwaj Scholarship (2000)

National Advanced Placement Scholar (2000)

Valedictorian, Waubonsie Valley High School (2000)

National Merit Finalist (2000)

 

 

Service

 

DEC/5 SCS Graduate Student Organization (2006 – present)

Student volunteer, OOPSLA (2004, 2005)

Captain, ISRI Hidden Dragons (2005) and Misunderestimated (2007) volleyball teams

Software Engineering Graduate Student Association Representative (2004 – 2006)

St. Andrew’s Church Council (2001 – 2004)

Chair, SigSoft at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002 – 2003)

Internal Vice-President, Technological Frontiers Society (2001 – 2003)

Engineering Council Academic Programs Committee (2001 – 2002)