Heather M. Conboy

Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst

314 Computer Science Building, 140 Governors Drive, Amherst, MA 01003-9264

Email: hconboy@cs.umass.edu, Curriculum Vitae

Overview

I am a part-time Lecturer teaching computer science courses to undergraduate and graduate students. I am also a Senior Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER). My teaching and research interests are in: software engineering, program analysis, run-time environments, ethical and responsible computing. It is important to me to provide research experience to students through advising and mentoring honors projects and independent studies.

Teaching

Current Courses: Latest Student Research Projects:

Research

Medical Safety Project:

Many medical processes (e.g., cardiac surgery) are inherently complex, which can lead to errors (e.g., failure to ventilate) harming the patients. These processes involve concurrent activities, timely communication, and complicated exception handling and thus are challenging to manually reason about. We are investigating an approach to leverage rigorous models of such medical processes to automate this reasoning to help prevent errors. This approach validates the medical process models with static program analyses (e.g., model checking, specification synthesis) to detect errors. The approach dynamically generates process-model-driven guidance (e.g., electronic checklists) for the medical clinicians performing the real-world processes to reduce errors. After the real-world medical process changes, its model should be updated, revalidated, and used to regenerate the guidance. We evaluated this iterative medical process improvement approach on cases studies (e.g., cardiac surgery, chemotherapy) in collaboration with medical clinicians (e.g., Harvard Medical School, Baystate Hospital). With the static analyses, the chemotherapy case study reported a 70% reduction in errors. For the dynamic guidance, I held focus groups of cardiac surgery team members to obtain their feedback on it. I later was first a designer and then a confederate for a usability trial where cardiac surgeons used this guidance in a simulated operating room. These cardiac surgery team members could see the potential to improve training and reduce errors.

Platform for Ethical and Responsible Computing Education (PEaRCE) Project:

This platform supports computer science professors and teaching assistants immersing their students in simulations of software development project scenarios to increase student awareness of how their technical decisions can lead to unintended project outcomes. The platform can be used to inspire classroom discussions about ethical and responsible computing.

Recent Publications: