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Chung

Publications and source records attributed to Chung.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

Collaborator or Assistant? How AI Coding Agents Partition Work Across Pull Request Lifecycles

When AI coding agents open branches and submit pull requests (PRs), two questions co-determine oversight design: who starts the work (operational agency) and who authorizes its completion (merge governance). We characterize tools along a Collaborator-Assistant spectrum in how they redistribute initiative, oversight, and endorsement, while merge governance remains predominantly human across five tools (OpenAI, Copilot, Devin, Cursor, Claude Code). We analyze 29,585 PR lifecycles using an Initiator x Approver taxonomy with six interaction scenarios; lifecycle reconstruction supplies the how behind those roles. Collaborator tools (Cursor, Devin, Copilot) concentrate operational initiative in agents that open and carry PR work forward, with humans retaining review and endorsement on the path to merge; Assistant tools (OpenAI, Claude) leave task direction primarily with humans and supply bounded support within human-led workflows. Across the spectrum, agency and governance decouple: Collaborator workflows are >=96% agent initiated, yet terminal merge authority remains almost exclusively human, with agent-classified approvers confined to a small fraction of PRs. Where automation executes a merge, logs record the executor but not the decision-maker, marking a boundary of observation. We contribute the taxonomy, per-tool state machines, and a replication package for research on automation, oversight, and governance in PR workflows.

cs.SE

Understanding the Practices, Perceptions, and (Dis)Trust of Generative AI among Instructors: A Mixed-methods Study in the U.S. Higher Education

Generative AI (GenAI) has brought opportunities and challenges for higher education as it integrates into teaching and learning environments. As instructors navigate this new landscape, understanding their engagement with and attitudes toward GenAI is crucial. We surveyed 178 instructors from a single U.S. university to examine their current practices, perceptions, trust, and distrust of GenAI in higher education in March 2024. While most surveyed instructors reported moderate to high familiarity with GenAI-related concepts, their actual use of GenAI tools for direct instructional tasks remained limited. Our quantitative results show that trust and distrust in GenAI are related yet distinct; high trust does not necessarily imply low distrust, and vice versa. We also found significant differences in surveyed instructors' familiarity with GenAI across different trust and distrust groups. Our qualitative results show nuanced manifestations of trust and distrust among surveyed instructors and various approaches to support calibrated trust in GenAI. We discuss practical implications focused on (dis)trust calibration among instructors.

cs.HC

Evaluating the Effectiveness of LLMs in Introductory Computer Science Education: A Semester-Long Field Study

The integration of AI assistants, especially through the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), into computer science education has sparked significant debate. An emerging body of work has looked into using LLMs in education, but few have examined the impacts of LLMs on students in entry-level programming courses, particularly in real-world contexts and over extended periods. To address this research gap, we conducted a semester-long, between-subjects study with 50 students using CodeTutor, an LLM-powered assistant developed by our research team. Our study results show that students who used CodeTutor (the experimental group) achieved statistically significant improvements in their final scores compared to peers who did not use the tool (the control group). Within the experimental group, those without prior experience with LLM-powered tools demonstrated significantly greater performance gain than their counterparts. We also found that students expressed positive feedback regarding CodeTutor's capability, though they also had concerns about CodeTutor's limited role in developing critical thinking skills. Over the semester, students' agreement with CodeTutor's suggestions decreased, with a growing preference for support from traditional human teaching assistants. Our analysis further reveals that the quality of user prompts was significantly correlated with CodeTutor's response effectiveness. Building upon our results, we discuss the implications of our findings for integrating Generative AI literacy into curricula to foster critical thinking skills and turn to examining the temporal dynamics of user engagement with LLM-powered tools. We further discuss the discrepancy between the anticipated functions of tools and students' actual capabilities, which sheds light on the need for tailored strategies to improve educational outcomes.

cs.HC

Privacy Guarantees of BLE Contact Tracing: A Case Study on COVIDWISE

Google and Apple jointly introduced a digital contact tracing technology and an API called "exposure notification," to help health organizations and governments with contact tracing. The technology and its interplay with security and privacy constraints require investigation. In this study, we examine and analyze the security, privacy, and reliability of the technology with actual and typical scenarios (and expected typical adversary in mind), and quite realistic use cases. We do it in the context of Virginia's COVIDWISE app. This experimental analysis validates the properties of the system under the above conditions, a result that seems crucial for the peace of mind of the exposure notification technology adopting authorities, and may also help with the system's transparency and overall user trust.

cs.CR