Demo Data from SIGIR 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Thad Polk
dblp:409/0381
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper |
Empirical software engineering · 100% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Empirical software engineering › developer studies
developer expertise |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Studying Programmers Without Programming: Investigating Expertise Using Resting State fMRI · ICSE 2025 |
Empirical software engineering
developer studies |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Studying Programmers Without Programming: Investigating Expertise Using Resting State fMRI · ICSE 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
resting-state analysis · 0.9fMRI · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Studying Programmers Without Programming: Investigating Expertise Using Resting State fMRIabstractExpert programmers are more effective at coding activities, but the reasons for this remain elusive. Accordingly, recent research has used neuroimaging such as fMRI to analyze how expert programmers might think as they perform coding activities. Those experiments have all involved specific program-ming tasks (i.e., comprehension), but have been unable to detect systematic differences based on coding experience. By using tasks, however, those studies may limit the number and type of brain networks involved. In Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers commonly analyze resting-state data, in which participants' brain activity is recorded as they lay idle in the scanner. The brain's functional organization is plastic, and can change with experience. These changes can be measured at rest, making this a suitable data type for studying how programming activities affect neural organization over time. In this paper, we analyzed the resting state scans from 150 participants, 96 of whom were programmers. We found increased connectivity in programmers between brain regions involved in language, math, and the tempo-ral attention. Non-programmers demonstrated more connectivity with regions involved in social and emotional cognition. We found that as years of programming experience increases, connectivity decreases between two regions associated with visual processing during reading and articulation, respectively. Zachary Karas, Benjamin Gold, Violet Zhou, Noah Reardon, Thad Polk, Catie Chang |
ICSE | 5 |