Welcome to my website. In case you are wondering about my name, you can call me Sruti (pronounced as /ʃrut̪i/ or sh-ru-thi).
I am a CS Ph.D. candidate at Oregon State University, USA. My advisor is Dr. Margaret Burnett. My research interests lie at the intersection of software engineering and human computer interaction. I use human behavioral theories to understand how programmers work and think and then employ that knowledge to build better tools for programmers and software developers.
Most of my grad school research has to do with Information Foraging Theory in some form: either as an tool for understanding and improving version control or as a theoretical framework on which my “variations foraging theory” is built. I won Best Paper Awards (once at ICSME and once at CHI) for both these lines of work.
In Summer 2018, I interned with the Calc Intelligence group at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK, building and evaluating tools for spreadsheet users, a class of end-user programmers.
In a past avatar, I was a software developer at ThoughtWorks. I still see myself as a developer and love reading hacker news and asking my friends to show me code they write in new languages and paradigms.
When I am not doing something related to Computer Science, I am reading on Indian history, Indian schools of philosophy, cooking or watching/listening to classical and folk art forms of India.
A useless fact: I read, write and speak four languages, including two classical languages, Tamil and Sanskrit. (The other two are Hindi and English). I’m also a beginner spoken-Telugu student.
I’m married to Dr. Sudarshan Narayanan, a materials scientist, violinist and Sanskrit teacher.
