University of Massachusetts Amherst

The Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) track of the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity recently honored University of Massachusetts at Amherst doctoral student Emma Tosch with its Best Paper award. The recognition came for her work on a first-of-its-kind software system designed to improve the accuracy and trustworthiness of surveys. A free and publicly available tool, "Surveyman" can identify problems in any survey from the design stage and onward. Tosch says the tool guides users through steps to create a spreadsheet that will become a new survey, addressing key areas that can lead to bias in a survey, such as question order and word variation. To read further, please visit http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/new-%E2%80%98surveyman%E2%80%99-software-promises.