Name:Amy Ko

Bio:

Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy). She co-directs the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination, where she studies computing education, human-computer interaction, and humanity’s individual and collective struggle to understand computing and harness it for equity, justice, and liberation. With her collaborators, she’s invented many programming languages and tools to support debugging, program understanding, reuse, and learning; founded and sold a venture-backed startup focused on software troubleshooting; developed numerous ways to weave equity and justice into computing education pedagogy, culture, and technology; and impacted local, state, and federal K-12 CS education policy through community organizing and advocacy. Her work spans more than 140 peer-reviewed publications, with 23 receiving distinguished paper awards and 6 receiving most influential paper awards. She is an ACM Distinguished Member and a member of the SIGCHI Academy, for her substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction, computing education, and software engineering. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002.

Country:United States

Affiliation:University of Washington

Research interests:Computing Education, HCI, Software Engineering