Barbara Staudt Lerner

she/her

  • Professor of Computer Science
  • Co-chair of Computer Science
Barbara Staudt Lerner

Barbara Lerner's research focuses on helping scientists understand the provenance of their data. Just as the provenance, or history, of a piece of art work can improve confidence in the authenticity of the art, so too, the history of scientific data can improve one's confidence in the reliability of the data. The provenance of scientific data includes information such as where and when the data was collected, using what instruments, and what scientist or organization was responsible for the collection, but it extends far beyond this. It also includes history about how the data is processed from its point of collection to its point of dissemination. This typically includes information about adjustments to sensor readings to account for sensors slipping out of calibration, discarding of clearly inaccurate data (such as air temperatures far outside of the normal range), and information about the insertion of modeled data to replace missing data (due to power failures, for example).

Scientists can use this provenance to help them better understand their data. Lerner's research focuses on ways to automate the collection of provenance and to make provenance accessible to scientists using visualization and query technology.

In addition, Lerner is interested in technology to assist the blind. In a project motivated by her mother-in-law when she lost her sight, Lerner has developed technology that allows a blind person to play bridge with sighted players, using playing cards, rather than a computer interface to minimize the disruption to the normal social nature of a bridge game. Working with honors student Srishti Palani, she developed a system using Bluetooth sensors to identify people in the vicinity of a blind person and to provide haptic and audible feedback to notify the blind person.

At Mount Holyoke, Lerner has introduced courses in software design, programming languages, and a software practicum in which students work in teams to design and develop software solutions for clients. She also teaches courses in object-oriented programming, algorithms and operating systems.

Areas of Expertise

Scientific data provenance, software design, assistive technology

Education

  • Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon
  • B.S., Moravian College

Happening at Mount Holyoke

Recent Campus News

Mount Holyoke College student Cynthia Akanaga ’25 has been named to Major League Hacking’s Top 50 List for 2023.

Recent Grants

Barbara Lerner (Computer Science) received a sub award from Harvard under National Science Foundation (NSF) award 1450277 “S12-SSI: Collaborative Research: Bringing End to End Prevenance to Scientists.” The project is for one year.

Recent Publications

Emery R. Boose and Barbara S. Lerner, “Replication of data and metadata: a case-study of the analytic web”, in There and back again: the challenge of replication in long-term biodiversity research, Ayelet Shavit and Aaron M. Ellison, eds., Yale University Press, 2017.

Barbara S. Lerner and Emery R. Boose. “RDataTracker: Collecting provenance in an interactive scripting environment”, in 6th Usenix Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (TAPP), Cologne, Germany, June 2014.

Barbara Lerner, Emery Boose, Leon Osterweil, Aaron Ellison, Lori Clarke, "Provenance and Quality Control in Sensor Networks", Environmental Information Management Conference, Santa Barbara, California, September 2011.

Barbara Staudt Lerner, Stefan Christov, Leon J. Osterweil, Reda Bendraou, Udo Kannengiesser and Alexander Wise, “Exception Handling Patterns for Process Modeling”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Special Issue on Exception Handling, March/April 2010, 162-183.

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