Theory of mind is central to human social behavior, yet empirical studies rely largely on biased measures with limited ecological validity. We propose and evaluate the use of mental state language as a spontaneous indicator of theory of mind expressed in social interaction. Among research participants (334 undergraduate students, 63.8% non-Hispanic White, 74.3% female) engaged in a dyadic cooperative task with an unfamiliar peer, mental state language demonstrated strong convergent validity with established measures of theory of mind and, when compared to established measures, superior predictive validity for interpersonal functioning. Fine-tuned transformers and open-source generative large language models reliably replicated human coding of mental state language, enabling scalable assessment. These findings offer promising initial construct-validity evidence for mental state language as a measure of theory of mind, and motivate its extension to naturalistic, dynamically unfolding social interactions.
The results are packaged in the Greenfield Startup Model (GSM), which explains the priority of startups to release the product as quickly as possible, and the need to shorten time-to-market, by speeding up the development through low-precision engineering activities.
Carmine Giardino, Nicolò Paternoster, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· IEEE Transactions on Softwar...· 178 citations· ⚡14
Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited timeframes and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models.
M. Unterkalmsteiner, P. Abrahamsson, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· e-Informatica Software Engin...· 157 citations· ⚡17
This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.
Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al.· Empirical Software Engineeri...· 127 citations· ⚡15
The comparison of adopter and non-adopter sample reveals three potential adoption inhibitor, security, data privacy, and portability, which underlines the importance of the technical and security perspectives for research investigating the adoption of technology.
Nattakarn Phaphoom, Xiaofeng Wang, S. Samuel et al.· Journal of Systems and Softw...· 111 citations· ⚡8
The ongoing work building a Raspberry Pi cluster consisting of 300 nodes is presented, with potential use cases being an inexpensive and green test bed for cloud computing research and a robust and mobile data center for operating in adverse environments.
P. Abrahamsson, S. Helmer, Nattakarn Phaphoom et al.· IEEE International Conferenc...· 110 citations· ⚡7
The results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains, and 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software are identified.
D. Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang et al.· International Conference on...· 84 citations· ⚡6
