Democratizing Web Automation: Programming for Social Scientists and Other Domain Experts
In this talk, I’ll describe how I reformulated traditional web PBD around the insight that demonstrations are not always the easiest way for non-programmers to communicate their intent. By shifting from a purely Programming-By-Demonstration view to a Programming-By-X view that accepts a variety of user-friendly inputs, we can dramatically broaden the class of programs that come in reach for end-user programmers. My Helena ecosystem combines (i) usable PBD-based program drafting tools, (ii) learnable programing languages, and (iii) novel programming environment interactions. The end result: non-coders write Helena programs in 10 minutes that can handle the complexity of modern webpages, while coders attempt the same task and time out in an hour. I’ll conclude with predictions about the abstraction-resistant domains that will fall next—robotics, analysis of unstructured texts, image processing—and how hybrid PL-HCI breakthroughs will vastly expand access to programming.
Bio:
Sarah Chasins is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, advised by Ras Bodik. Her research interests lie at the intersection of programming languages and human-computer interaction. Much of her work is shaped by ongoing collaborations with social scientists, data scientists, and other non-traditional programmers. She has been awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship and a first place award in the ACM Student Research Competition.
Lunch for talk attendees will be available at 12:00pm.
To request accommodations for a disability, please contact Emily Lawrence, emilyl@cs.princeton.edu, 609-258-4624 at least one week prior to the event.