Professor Burnett Delivers Distinguished Talk on "Outside-the-Box" Perspectives

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is proud to recognize Professor Margaret M. Burnett as a 2026 recipient of the KU EECS Distinguished Service (KEDS) Award. A two-time KU alumna (M.S. '81, Ph.D. '91), Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University and a global pioneer in end-user software engineering, inclusive design, and explainable AI. Her work has shaped commercial software used by millions and earned her recognition as an ACM Fellow and the 2023 AnitaB.org Abie Award for Technical Leadership.

Unable to attend the KEDS ceremony on April 30, 2026, Burnett returned to campus on November 5, 2026, to receive her award and deliver a distinguished lecture drawing on decades of research in end-user computing.

In her talk, Burnett challenged the audience to step outside familiar "boxes," not only in how we innovate but in how we think about bugs themselves. Moving beyond the traditional "buggy code" box, she traced the evolution from failures to faults, from finding bugs to fixing them, and from conventional to highly non-traditional notions of what counts as a bug. She argued that intellectual freedom emerges when we shift from mechanisms to policies, from narrow sub-sub-areas to the whole software lifecycle, and from the "typical developer" to diverse human perspectives.

The lecture closed with a practical call to action. Burnett showed how attendees can design differently: by letting users take control and solve problems, measuring inclusivity bugs in AI systems, using tools such as SESMag, encouraging multiple perspectives through After-Action Review for AI (AAR/AI), following Adobe's inclusive design guidelines, and grounding design in virtue ethics that support human dignity, family and community, and the planet.

Her message was clear: real progress in software comes not from staying inside the box, but from asking who the box was built for, and who it leaves out.