Darren (Ren) Butler

Darren (Ren) Butler

Doctoral Researcher enhancing neurodiverse collaboration in AI engineering education and practice.

Publications

Fostering Psychological Safety for Interpersonal Learning in Neurodiverse Software Teams

Published in Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 2025

In software engineering, psychological safety is the shared belief that team members feel safe to take interpersonal risks in the form of learning behaviors like seeking feedback or admitting mistakes in the workplace… To identify tools and practices that foster psychological safety in neurodiverse collaborative mob programming, I will conduct a series of mixed-method, design-based studies. Read more

Recommended citation: Darren Butler. 2025. Fostering Psychological Safety for Interpersonal Learning in Neurodiverse Software Teams. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference for Research on Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT 2025), July 14–16, 2025, Newark, NJ, USA . ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3704637.3734749 http://darrendbutler.github.io/files/RESPECT_Doctoral_Consortium_Research_Summary.pdf

Preparing Autistic Students for the AI Workforce

Published in ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 2025

To explore how to help autistic students adapt to non-autistic normative software engineering environments, we designed and taught a first-of-its-kind online project course on AI, explicitly teaching communication and teamwork skills with purposefully designed scaffolds. Read more

Recommended citation: JiWoong (Joon) Jang, Ren Butler, Rory McDaniel, Aidan San, D. Matthew Boyer, Somayeh Asadi, Richard Kubina Jr., Taniya Mishra, and Andrew Begel. 2025. Preparing Autistic Students for the AI Workforce. In 33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE Companion ’25), June 23–28, 2025, Trondheim, Norway. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3696630.3727233 http://darrendbutler.github.io/files/FSE_2025_PAS4AI.pdf