Janet Burge, Assistant Professor, CSE

Dr. Janet Burge, assistant professor of computer science and software engineering was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for $527,684 for a five-year project: “Rationale Capture for High-Assurance Systems.” Dr. Burge studies how rationale, the reasons behind the decisions made when developing software or other engineering artifacts can be captured and used to support software engineering. Rationale can be very useful when a system needs to be extended, repaired, or re-used but capturing this information is time consuming and expensive. The project will study how rationale can be extracted from existing documents and re-structured so it is easily accessible to software developers and maintainers.

Here are some of her thoughts on what this grant will mean:

“The NSF early career development (CAREER) awards are different from other types of research grants because they are intended to kick-start a new faculty member’s career as a teacher-scholar. This means that they don’t just involve supporting a large research project-they also support educational research, new course development, and outreach. In addition to the research project that gives the project its title, I’ll be studying how using rationale in the classroom helps students learn, developing two new courses as part of our new Software Engineering degree program, and teaming Miami students doing their senior design projects with High School students to build devices to help people with disabilities communicate better. One of the things that is great about teaching at Miami is that research and teaching are both valued and being able to integrate the two is especially rewarding.”

Dr. Burge came to Miami after finishing her PhD at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2005 and after having worked 20 years in industry as a software engineer and research scientist.

“I feel very fortunate to have worked in the field before going back to school to get my PhD. It wasn’t always easy making the transition back to being a student but now I get to have the fun of sharing my experiences with my students. I’ve discovered that when I ask students questions on their exams the answers and examples that come back to me are not from the lecture slides or the textbook – they are from the stories that I’ve told them about what happened to me on the job. These real-life stories seem to be the ones that “stick.” My goal is to help students see how the material they learn in class really does connect with what they need to know in the workplace.”