Khadijah Al Safwan

Khadijah Al Safwan

Ph.D. Candidate
I am a graduate student in the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science and my advisor is professor Francisco Servant. My research area is Software Engineering including software changes comprehension and software visualization. I am interested in helping software developers understand the evolution of software and improve their productivity.

Education

Virginia Tech

Doctor of Philosophy

Computer Science
Virginia Tech

Master of Science

Computer Science
University of Dammam

Bachelor of Science

Computer Science

Publications

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  • All
  • Recent
  • 2015 (1)
  • 2016 (1)
  • 2019 (1)
  • 24\% Acceptance Rate (1)
  • Conference Paper (2)
  • ESEC SIGSOFT FSE (1)
  • First Author (3)
  • IJCDS (1)
  • Journal Paper (1)

  • 2019

    Khadijah Al Safwan and Francisco Servant

    Decomposing the Rationale of Code Commits: The Software Developers' Perspective

    Tallinn, Harju, Estonia

    Proceedings of the ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE 2019)

    DBLP DOI Zenod (Replication Package) PowerPoint PDF

    Communicating the rationale behind decisions is essential for the success of software engineering projects. In particular, understanding the rationale of code commits is an important and often difficult task. We posit that part of such difficulty lies in rationale often being treated as a single piece of information. In this paper, we set to discover the breakdown of components in which developers decompose the rationale of code commits in the context of software maintenance and to understand their experience with it and with its individual components. For this goal, we apply a mixed-methods approach, interviewing 20 software developers to ask them how they decompose rationale and surveying an additional 24 developers to understand their experiences needing, finding, and recording those components. We found that developers decompose the rationale of code commits into 15 components, each of which is differently needed, found, and recorded. These components are: goal, need, benefits, constraints, alternatives, selected alternative, dependencies, committer, time, location, modifications, explanation of modifications, validation, maturity stage, and side effects. Our findings provide multiple implications. Educators can now disseminate the multiple dimensions and importance of the rationale of code commits. For practitioners, our decomposition of rationale defines a "common vocabulary" to use when discussing rationale of code commits, which we expect to strengthen the quality of their rationale sharing and documentation process. For researchers, our findings enable techniques for automatically assessing, improving, and generating rationale of code commits to specifically target the components that developers need.

  • 2016

    Khadijah Al Safwan , Fatimah AlShaer , Lolah Hakami , Khawlah Aseeri , Masoumah AlJishi , and Dilek Dustegor

    Design and Implementation of a Residential Energy Monitoring System Prototype Tailored to Meet Local Needs

    International Journal of Computing and Digital Systems (IJCDS)

    SemanticScholar DOI PDF

    The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, like many other Gulf Council Countries, is lately experiencing a very rapid population and industrial growth, which results in an increasing demand for energy. To meet this growing demand, the GCC is also transitioning towards a smarter electricity grid with increased penetration of renewable sources. However, all agree that the success of such a shift in paradigm also depends on demand-side management, most of the energy demands coming from the residential area. Providing residents with real-time feedback on their energy consumption is a promising way to promote energy-saving behavior through increased awareness. This paper outlines the design and development phases of a residential energy monitoring system that has been tailored to meet local needs, that is to say, a non-intrusive system with a user-friendly interface available both in English and Arabic endowed with an alert system providing real-time consumption information, as well as energy-saving and awareness tips.

  • 2015

    Khadijah Al Safwan , Fatimah AlShaer , Lolah Hakami , Khawlah Aseeri , Masoumah AlJishi , and Dilek Dustegor

    iTrack: A Residential Energy Monitoring System Tailored to Meet Local Needs

    Zallaq, Bahrain, Bahrain

    Fifth International Conference on e-Learning: Cognitively Informed Technology (econf)

    DOI PDF PowerPoint

    The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, like many other Gulf Council Countries, is lately experiencing a very rapid population and industrial growth, which results in an increasing demand for energy. To meet this growing demand, the GCC is transitioning towards a smarter electricity grid with increased penetration of renewable sources. However, all agree that the success of such a shift in paradigm also depends on demand-side management, most of the energy demands coming from the residential area. Providing residents with real-time feedback on their energy consumption is a promising way to promote energy-saving behavior through increased awareness. This paper outlines the design and development phases of a residential energy monitoring system that has been tailored to meet local needs, that is to say, a non-intrusive system with a user-friendly interface available both in English and Arabic endowed with an alert system providing real-time consumption information, as well as energy-saving and awareness tips.

Work Experience

  • All
  • Current
  • Academic
  • Industry

  • 2019 - Now

    Graduate Teaching Assistant

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I worked as a teaching assistant (GTA) for various computer science courses (graduate and undergraduate) including software engineering, databases, data structure, and web development courses.

    Semester

    Course

    Instructor/s

    Students

    2021 Spring

    CS 3704 Intermediate Software Design

    Khadijah Al Safwan

    90 Students

    2020 Fall

    CS 5774 User Interface Software

    Dr. Kurt Luther

    25 Students

    2020 Summer

    CS 3114 Data Structures & Algorithms

    Rifat Sabbir Mansur (Ri)

    41 Students

    2020 Spring

    CS 4604 Introduction to Data Base Management Systems

    Richard Quintin and Michael Schulte

    64 Students

    2019 Fall

    CS 5704 Software Engineering

    Dr. Francisco Servant

    21 Students

    2019 Spring

    CS 5704 Software Engineering

    Dr. Gregory Kulczycki

    61 Students

  • Fall 2018 and Summer 2021

    Graduate Research Assistant

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I worked as a graduate research assistant (GRA) for Dr. Francisco Servant research projects during Fall 2018 and Summer 2021.

  • 2014 - 2015

    Researcher

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    For the senior project of my undergraduate studies, I lead a team of five students. We build a prototype for a research project.

  • Summer 2014

    COOP Trainee

    Wipro Arabia Limited

    Al Khobar, Eastern, KSA

    I train at Wipro the summer after my junior year.

  • Oct - Dec 2013

    Administrative-Work Assistant

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I helped the administration office staff of the Computer Science Department. I worked on the paperwork for exams scheduling and arrangement.

  • Summer 2013

    Summer Trainee

    Saudi Aramco

    Dhahran, Eastern, KSA

    I train at Saudi Aramco the summer after my sophomore year.

Awards

  • All
  • Recent
  • Travel Award (2)
  • Scholarship (1)
  • Excellence Award (2)
  • Competition Winning Award (2)

  • 2020 Academic Year

    Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I was awarded the graduate teaching assistant of the year title during the annual department awards ceremony.

  • 2019

    Travel to Tapia Conference Award

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I was rewarded with a travel award to the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference.

  • 2019

    ACM SIGSOFT Travel Support at ESEC/FSE 2019 Conferences

    ACM SIGSOFT

    I have received travel reimbursement of expenses for 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.

  • 2016 - 2018

    Graduate Studies Scholarship

    Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (SACM)

    Washington, DC, USA

    I was gifted with a full scholarship for the master degree including the university tuition and living expenses.

  • 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015

    Annual Excellence Award

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I was honored for having a cumulative GPA above 4.5 out of 5 for four consecutive years.

  • 2012

    Coding Marathon Winning Award

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    The team I was leading won the competition of the programming race.

  • 2012

    Best Management Committee Award

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    My team won the competition for managing the edition of network magazine for Network Protocols & E-Commerce course.

Skills

  • All
  • Most Expert In
  • Computer Skills (78)
  • Apps and Tools (34)
  • Programming Languages (17)
  • Cloud Computing (16)
  • Data Science (15)
  • Office and Writing (13)
  • Integrated Development Environments (9)
  • Modeling and Design (7)
  • Visualization Tools (6)
  • Google G Suite (5)
  • JetBrains (5)
  • Microsoft Office (4)
  • Server (4)
  • Soft Skills (4)
  • Adobe (3)
  • Communication (3)
  • File Transfer (3)
  • Operating Systems (3)
  • Simulation Tools (3)
  • Grading (2)
  • Remote Connection (2)
  • Spoken Languages (2)
  • Teaching (2)
  • Hardware (1)

Adobe Dreamweaver

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Lightroom

Axure

Balsamiq Wireframes

Circuit Maker

D3

Enterprise Architect

Lucidchart

MatLab

Mathematica

Microsoft SQL Server

MySQL Workbench

National Instruments
Packet Tracer

Processing

R

SPSS

Skype

Slack

Tableau

Zoom

Amazon Web Service

Apache

CPanel

Cyberduck

Docker

FileZilla

GoodSync

Nginx

Passenger

Putty

Raspberry Pi

VNC

XAMPP

Apache Solr

MongoDB

MySQL

DataGrip

IntelliJ

NetBeans

PHPStorm

PyCharm

SAP IDE

Visual Studio

WebStorm

Atom

Excel

Google Docs

Google Drive

Google Forms

Google Sheets

Google Slides

LaTeX

PowerPoint

Qualtrics

Sublime Text

Visio

Word

Mac OS

Ubuntu Linux

Windows

ABAP
ASP.NET
C
C++

CSS

HTML5

JQuery

Java

JavaScript

Lisp

NodeJs

PHP

Prolog

Python

SQL

Scheme

Leadership

Organization

Technical Writing

Verbal Communication

Arabic

English

Canvas

Web-Cat

Projects

  • All
  • Recent
  • Course Project (18)
  • University of Dammam (14)
  • Programming (12)
  • Virginia Tech (7)
  • Topic Search (3)
  • Hardware (2)
  • Prototype (2)
  • Desktop Application (1)
  • Empirical Study (1)
  • Modeling and Simulation (1)
  • Research (1)
  • Senior Project (1)

Activities and Services

  • All
  • Recent
  • Volunteering (7)
  • Virginia Tech (14)
  • University of Dammam (5)
  • Services (2)
  • Research (6)
  • Presentations (5)
  • Papers Review (2)
  • Mentorship (3)
  • Leadership (1)
  • Conferences (5)
  • Career Development (5)
  • 2021 (6)
  • 2020 (3)
  • 2019 (8)
  • 2018 (1)
  • 2017 (2)
  • 2016 (1)
  • 2015 (3)
  • 2014 (2)
  • 2013 (2)

  • 2021

    Program Committee (PC) Member

    RAISE 2021

    Virtual venue

    I am participating in the 8th International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE 2021) program committee

  • Summer 2021

    Research Mentor

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I mentored   Zaineb Almarzooq   during the summer. Zaineb is an undergraduate student in the department who is interested in research.

  • 2021

    Shadow PC Member

    MSR 2021

    Virtual venue

    I am participating in 2021 Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR) Shadow program committee (Shadow PC)

  • Spring 2021

    Instructor of Record

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I am teaching Intermediate Software Design and Engineering (CS 3704) this spring 2021

  • Spring 2021

    A2i Attendee

    Virginia Tech Graduate School

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I attended the Accelerate to Industry (A2i) - Professional Development Series seminars/workshops in Spring 2021 semester.

  • Spring 2019 & 2020

    Recruitment Weekend Volunteer

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    The "Recruitment Weekend" events introduce Virginia Tech and the Computer Science (CS) department to prospective graduate students.
      - In 2019, I attended a social event and chatted with prospective students about graduate studies in the CS department.
      - In 2020, I joined the poster session where I presented a poster and talked about my research lab work. I also attended a social event.

  • Spring 2020

    5-Minutes Madness Presenter

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I introduced my research work in a "5-Minutes Madness" event for the computer science undergraduate students who are interested in research.

  • 2019 - Now

    Research Lab Representative

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    As a lab representative, I serve as a communication channel to the graduate council and department leadership.

  • Fall 2019

    Lightning Talk Presenter

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I introduced my research lab work in a "Lightning Talks" event for the computer science graduate students.

  • Sep 2019

    Tapia Conference Attendee

    Tapia

    San Diego, CA, USA

    I attended the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference. I was responsible for staffing the Virginia Tech booth in the conference career fair for two sessions.

  • 2016 & 2019

    CS Career Fair Attendee

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I attended the computer science (CS) career fair, which was a great opportunity for learning about the computing industry.

  • Aug 2019

    ESEC/FSE Conference Attendee

    ESEC/FSE

    Tallinn, Harju, Estonia

    I attended and presented a research paper at the 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE2019).

  • Summer 2019

    Research Mentor

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I mentored   Chenkai Ren   during the summer. Kai is an undergraduate student in the department who is interested in research.

  • 2018 - 2019

    VT PEERS Volunteer

    VT PEERS

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I volunteered for the VT PEERS Program, a partnering program with educators and engineers in rural schools. I participate as a facilitator to support hands-on classroom activities.

  • Summer 2017

    Research Mentor

    Virginia Tech

    Blacksburg, VA, USA

    I mentored   Jahdiel Couchman  during the summer. Jahdiel was a student in the   Multicultural Academic Opportunities Program (MAOP).

  • Feb 2017

    CAPWIC Conference Attendee

    CAPWIC

    Washington, DC, USA

    I attended the Capital Region Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (CAPWIC) keynotes, sessions, and workshops.

  • Mar 2015

    Career Forum Participant

    Dhahran Exhibitions

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I presented the idea of my senior project in the career forum organized by the University of Dammam.

  • Apr 2014

    University Libraries Volunteer

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I volunteered for the electronic resources of libraries workshop to educate the university students about the serveries offered by the electronic libraries.

  • Feb 2014 & 2015

    Aramco Seminar Attendee

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I completed the Saudi Aramco information technology seminar for female universities.

  • Dec 2013

    E-Government Workshop Volunteer

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I volunteered for the E-Government workshop to educated the university students about the electronic services provided by Saudi government ministries' websites.

  • Feb 2013

    University Intro-Session Volunteer

    University of Dammam

    Dammam, Eastern, KSA

    I volunteered for the university introductory session. I represented the College of Computer Science and Information Technology (CSIT) in the event to introduce the college program to high school students.

Contact Me

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