Adam Roe

Professor of Software Engineering

Background

Adam is interested in how things work, how to build things, and how to make sure humans don’t use our extraordinary capacities to kill ourselves and wipe out civilization. Deeply curious and adventurous, he has lived in 4 countries and by now speaks several languages poorly and none perfectly. He launched his first website while in high school around the year 2000 for his photography, and has been building websites for various purposes ever since. His academic training focused largely on physics, bringing him to CERN, where he worked on the early years of data analysis at the Large Hadron Collider for his P.h.D. thesis. In 2012, he moved to Berlin, and tried his hand at professional photography once again, only to realize that it should remain a hobby (but there are great stories to tell here, of course). Adam’s interests in politics, social justice, and technology dovetailed into him becoming the Chief Technology Officer of Kiron Open Higher Education, a social startup dedicated to helping refugees gain access to Higher Education. Adam has been at CODE full-time since 2018, and is currently focusing on the first year of studies, as well as advanced topics including Cloud Computing and Continuous Delivery. His current research interests lie in the learning sciences.

Current Research Activities

My current research interest lies primarily in the learning sciences and questions around curriculum design. While still relatively new to the field, my debut was the conference submission co-authored with colleagues entitled *The First Semester at CODE: Preparing Students for Project-Based Learning in a Curiosity-Driven Higher Education Learning Environment,* accepted for the PBL2020 conference, which is planned to be presented & published next year after a pandemic-related delay. In addition, I am investigating the tradeoff between privacy and usability in contemporary technologies.

Select Publications

As a particle physicist active in international collaborations from 2005-2012, my research and publications at the time focused on measuring what was happening in collisions at particle accelerators, and on the methods employed to do this. This included publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference talks, and my doctoral thesis work. During my time active in the EdTech scene I became interested in questions around technology and education; while I was more observing the field than actively researching at the time, work related to the challenges of using MOOCs for online higher education access for refugees was presented at the GML2 conference and published in the accompanying proceedings.