Thomas LaToza
Thomas LaToza
Associate Professor
Software engineering; human aspects of software development; human-computer interaction; crowdsourcing
Thomas LaToza is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Volgenau School of Engineering who studies how humans interact with code and design new ways to build software. His work operates at the intersection of software engineering and human-computer interaction.
LaToza uses behavioral methods to study developers as users of their programming tools, understand what makes designing, implementing, and debugging software hard, and re-envision the relationship between developers and code. A key focus of his work has been designing new techniques to view and manipulate code. He has pioneered the design of crowdsourced programming environments, which reify developer’s design knowledge, strategies, and mental models in explicit forms which can be manipulated by program analysis tools and connected to code.