This program is tentative and subject to change.

Fri 20 Feb 2026 11:40 - 12:00 at Meeting Room 105 - Visualization and Simulation

Programming students often struggle to find and fix performance bugs in their code. To provide students additional performance debugging support, as well as expose them to profiling tools, we developed Hypothesis Profiler (HyProf). HyProf automatically profiles a slow student submission and produces a profile visualization suitable for learners. In addition to showing individual function and line times, HyProf reports provide details about the call graph, lines that made recursive calls or did not execute, and offer hypotheses about possible causes of slow performance, formulated by comparing the slow profile against fast submissions from other students. We deployed HyProf in a 400-student Python course and evaluated it through web logs, office hour observations, and surveys, which showed that 75% of respondents successfully used HyProf to find or fix a performance issue and 85% would recommend it to others.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Fri 20 Feb

Displayed time zone: Central Time (US & Canada) change

10:40 - 12:00
Visualization and Simulation Papers at Meeting Room 105
10:40
20m
Talk
University of Washington Web-Based Simulators for Visualizing Cache and Virtual Memory Concepts
Papers
Justin Hsia University of Washington, Seattle
11:00
20m
Talk
ChartCode: A Tool for Visual Coding, Simulation, and Targeted Formative Evaluation
Papers
Guangming Xing Western Kentucky University, Gongbo Liang Texas A & M University - San Antonio, Tawfiq Salem Purdue University
11:20
20m
Talk
Enhancing Computer Network Education for High School Students with an Educational Simulator Visualizing Packet Retransmission and RoutingCC
Papers
Yuki Kitamura The University of Osaka, Tomonari Kishimoto Otemon Gakuin University, Hiroyuki Nagataki The University of Osaka, Susumu Kanemune Osaka Electro-Communication University, Shizuka Shirai The University of Osaka
11:40
20m
Talk
HyProf: A Profiler for Programming Students that Offers Hypotheses about Performance Bugs
Papers
Hope Dargan MIT CSAIL, Adam J. Hartz MIT EECS, Robert Miller MIT