I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. I research Human-Computer Interaction, especially Intelligent User Interfaces and End-User Programming. I also have broader interests in Software engineering and Cognitive Psychology. I get advice from Prof. James Landay, and collaborate with DUB. I run with a mean Seattle moped gang.

I got my Bachelor's degree at U.C. Berkeley, working with Andrew Begel and Susan L. Graham of the Harmonia group to develop novel interfaces for the task of writing computer programs.

REFORM: Teaching an Old Web New Tricks

Websites aren't designed specifically for you, the end user. Many websites list addresses without including a Google map. Amazon doesn't tell you when there's a better deal on another website. Reform lets you fix websites, with a new learning algorithm that lets you teach your web browser how to apply enhancements to the sits you use.

Watch the video or read the paper for more information.

Shared Knowledge Access Control

Leveraging Social Smarts over Logic

How much of your personal life is on Facebook, MySpace, blogs, Flickr, or YouTube? Are there things you would like to share with some people, but not everyone?

We propose users protect semi-private personal content on the internet behind questions of shared knowledge. For instance, "what is cousin rodney's catchphrase?" can allow access from a hundred extended family members, without giving them accounts, passwords, and tediously adding them to access control lists.

Read the paper for more information.

Linked Editing

My Bachelor's thesis is to manage repeating concepts in source code with an intelligent editor, rather than language abstractions. This challenges 50 years of software development wisdom, education and research. A user study shows that it works.

Read the paper for more information.

• Won 2^nd place in the 2003 Intel Student Reseach Contest
• Published at VL/HCC 2004 (PDF)

Harmonia-Mode: Programming with Structured Text – or Textual Structure

What if your text editor married a compiler?

Modern text editors are getting smarter about your code, while structure editors have become more text-like.

With the Harmonia group, I fused these two programming paradigms together in an experimental editor called Harmonia-Mode. It intertwines a traditional text editor (XEmacs) with the structural representation of the Harmonia framework's incremental program analyses. Now you can interact with your code's structure and semantics just as easily as its ASCII.

• Harmonia-Mode has been released. We also just (Oct. 2005) released the source code, letting anyone build their own structural-textual (strextual?) interface features, analyses, etc.
• Harmonia-Mode is used by Berkeley's compilers course; students write their program analyses in our editor that analyzes their programs.

$h4z@M (Shazam)

Project with Ibrahim Merchant in Design Realization: the first (ever) course offered by the Berkeley Institute of Design.

• March 2003: $h4z@M was featured in the March 2003 issue of Lab Notes.
• June 2003: Featured in issue 7 of "Loop", a journal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)

FireWall

A digital whiteboard command-post for firefighters. I did this with three other awesome undergraduates in CS160 (undergraduate HCI) at Berkeley. We actually built and tested our designs with real firefighters throughout the San Francisco bay area. They loved it, and we got to ride in fire trucks!

See the FireWall web site for more information.

• FireWall was picked up, extended, and published anew by a group of graduate student researchers at Berkeley. Check out the Siren project. We're acknowledged in their CHI2004 paper.
• FireWall was one of three projects selected to feature at Fall 2000 HCI project fair.
• Our design was later reimplemented as a CS169 software engineering class project in spring 2001.

Brainstorm

Collaborative brainstorming application using a digital whiteboard and physical post-it notes. With Gerelee Goltsev, Bjorn Liljequist, and Shilpa Sood.

• Brainstorm was conceived as an independent offshoot from The Designer's Outpost. Some of our results made their way back into Outpost, and we were acknowledged in a CSCW paper.
• Our design was also picked up by Jason Hong, who re-implemented a digital version of Brainstorm as a sample application for the Satin toolkit.