Murphy-Hill receives NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, known as the NSF CAREER Award, is one of the highest honors given by NSF to young faculty in science and engineering.

The award will provide funding over five years to support Murphy-Hill’s project, “Expanding Developers’ Usage of Software Tools by Enabling Social Learning.” The research is supported by NSF’s Software Engineering and Formal Methods Program in the Division of Computer and Communication Foundations.

The project aims to increase the frequency and effectiveness of social tool learning – the sharing of tools such as memory debuggers and performance analyzers between software developers – so developers are more aware of these helpful programs and applications.

Murphy-Hill and his team will create a system that records continuous screencasts of the software developers’ work and then encourages the sharing of tool-usage clips between developers so that peers learn from one another. This method will enable developers who otherwise might not work together to share knowledge about tools. That could result in the development of better software.

Murphy-Hill received his BS from Evergreen State College in 2001 and his PhD from Portland State University in 2009. He joined the NC State faculty in 2010.