Greeshma Reddy Padiri - MS Final Oral
Speaker:Greeshma Reddy Padiri
Title: Using EEG to Assess Programming Expertise against Self-reported Data
Abstract: Cognitive processes like working memory, attention play a key role in evaluating any subject's performance at a given task. Instead of proceeding with conventional methods that use task the completion time or accuracy or runtime of the program, we use human Electroencephalography (EEG) data and its features to quantify the programming expertise of individuals.
Motivated by few other works with similar research goals, we use EEG to check if there is any correlation between the cognitive load and the self-reported data. We believe that this study helps to learn further about common threats to validity associated with the research in this area.
Hypothesizing that there is no difference between the cognitive load experienced by experts and novices, we collected the EEG data of twenty-three participants in a controlled experiment and examined if the novice and the expert programmers could be grouped based on their EEG data. Emotiv Epoc is used as the Brain-Computer Interface device to record the electrical pulses produced in the brain. Main parts of this project include planning and conducting the lab experiment during which participants provide their answers to the given Java programming questions, signal analysis and feature extraction, data processing, and data clustering. Our results showed that most of the non-expert programmers data could be grouped correctly.