News

January 2023

• Happy New Year!

November 2022

• I’ve volunteered to help with the hci.social Mastodon instance. Create an account and come join us!

September 2022

• Our CACM Viewpoint article, Storytelling and Science, will appear in print in the upcoming October 2022 issue.

July 2022

• It’s been one year at Apple!

May 2022

• Attended ICSE in Pittsburgh!
• Attended CHI in New Orleans! Unfortunately, I also got COVID from the trip. 🥴
• Our paper, Symphony: Composing Interactive Interfaces for Machine Learning, has been accepted to CHI 2022!
• Our paper, Towards Complete Icon Labeling in Mobile Applications, has been accepted to CHI 2022!

March 2022

• Our paper, Understanding Screen Relationships from Screenshots of Smartphone Applications, has been accepted to IUI 2022!

January 2022

• Visited the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science (class of 1998–2000) and presented my talk on industry research careers. Met with many incredible students. Thanks to Sarah Brewer for the invitation!
• Happy New Year and welcome to 2022 (2020 too?)!

December 2021

• Executed periodic garbage collection of Twitter tweets. Here’s to a better 2022!

November 2021

• Attended the PLATEAU workshop on the intersection of HCI and PL at Carnegie Mellon University, and the working group on a platform for programming user studies. Notably, this was my first in-person trip since COVID-19.

October 2021

• Received Distinguished Paper Award for Learning Quick Fixes from Code Repositories, at SBES 2021!
• Thanks for attending VL/HCC 2021! I am happy to have been able to serve on the Program Committee and on the Organizing Committee as your Social Media Chair.
• My first time submitting to IUI!
• Our team at Apple is hiring multiple PhD research interns in HCMI, across many areas of expertise.

August 2021

• Our paper, reCode: A Lightweight Find-and-Replace Interaction in the IDE for Transforming Code by Example, has been accepted to UIST 2021! Watch the talk or read the Twitter thread.
• Our paper, Unravel: A Fluent Code Explorer for Data Wrangling, has been accepted to UIST 2021! Watch the talk.

July 2021

• I have joined Apple (AI/ML) as a Research Scientist!
• Taking most of this month off to reset and recover. 🌴

June 2021

• June 23rd is my last day at Microsoft 😭. It’s been a ride.
• Promoted to Senior Researcher (L64)!

May 2021

• Panelist for “Are academics working on the right problems?” at ICSE 2021, along with Felienne Hermans and Jordi Cabot (promotional tweet).
• Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on Intelligent Tutoring Systems and compiler error messages for novices and experts.
• See our AI for Programming Education project on GitHub, which provides AI-powered assistance to students taking programming classes and educators teaching them.

April 2021

• Two papers submitted to UIST!

March 2021

• Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on future investments in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
• Presented on Influence without Authority at PROSE weekly reading group.
• Happy Birthday! 🎂

February 2021

• PROSE team’s feature, IntelliCode Suggestions in Competion List, is now available in Visual Studio 16.9.
• Our paper, “Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?” (ICSE 2020) is in the list of ACM SIGSOFT Research Highlights (see the tweet)!
• We’ve released date/time formatting by example to IntelliCode Insiders! Also take a look at our tweet about it. Looking forward to adding support for additional libraries, including dayjs and luxon. 🎉
• Submitted one paper to FSE!
• Submitted one article to CACM!

January 2021

• Happy New Year!

December 2020

• On staycation until the end of the year. See you in January! 🎄
• Our paper, “Remote, but connected: How #TidyTuesday Provides an Online Community of Practice for Data Scientists”, has been accepted to CSCW 2021!
• Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on tools for developers.
• Two papers conditionally accepted to CHI 2021! I also reviewed three papers.
• Thinking about (partially) scripted live demos with tools like doitlive (CLI) and VSCode Hacker Type (seen in Writing Code like a Real Hacker).
• Many discussions on Ethics and AI. An important article by Timnit Gebru about her last days at Google: “Right now, it’s obviously very difficult to imagine how anybody can do any real research within these corporations.”
• See Automated Data Visualization with Falx (by UW PLSE and others), which combines data visualization using examples and synthesis.
• An old article (2008) by Peet M. about the infinitely profitable program, GO.COM.
• The Productivity+Intelligence group at Microsoft Research has multiple openings for researchers and interns.

November 2020

• My colleague Tom Zimmermann has been elevated to IEEE Fellow for contributions to data science in software engineering, research, and practice. Congratulations Tom!
• Vivek Halder has made a YouTube video covering our work on pain points with computational notebooks.
• Official Zoom background for Four Seasons Total Landscaping!
• November 4 is National Stress Awareness Day.

October 2020

• Conducted our workshop, “Lights! Camera! Action! Effective storytelling through video demos, screencasts, and more”, for Learning Day in DevDiv (Career and Leadership Track, with Mario Juarez of StoryCo).
• Invited to the VL/HCC 2021 Organizing Committee as Publicity Chair.
• What is the role of microstudies in software enginering research?

September 2020

• Three papers submitted to CHI!
• Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on Computer Science education.

August 2020

• Presented our work on stress and technical interviews to the Systems Reading group at Netflix. Lots of great questions and discussions around inclusive interview design.
• Presented my talk, “Building Tools for Computational Notebooks: A PL+HCI Approach”, at the PL+HCI “Swimmer” School. Daphne Miedema has a nice blog post about the experience.
• Interesting job description for Senior Human Factors Researcher at Apple: “An ideal candidate is a skilled storyteller fascinated by people. They are technical, with a deep familiarity of ML development, but also heavily rely on intuition and empathy for others. They approach research with curiosity and an appreciation for the infinite ways the human experience can vary. Readily moving between minute details and big ideas, they advocate for all people at every step in the process, engaging others in productive debate.”
• Danny Simmons, Engineering Manager for the PROSE team, writes about the role of research in engineering.

July 2020

• Received Distinguished Paper Award for Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language? at ICSE 2020.
• Received Distinguished Reviewer Award for ICPC 2020.
• After many years, found the source of my trickling AWS charges: it was SimpleDB.
• The July release of the Python for extension for Visual Studio Code is here, with Gather, the new extension for notebooks clean up.
• Considering “THE SCIENCE SHOULD NOT STAND IN THE WAY OF THIS” as a new opening for rebuttals.
• Plasmic is a visual builder for React.
• Presented in DevDiv Engineering Area Review, focus on tools for data science.

May 2020

• Read our blog post (Microsoft Research Blog): “Old tools, new tricks: Improving the computational notebook experience for data scientists,” spanning our research over three CHI papers.
• Our paper, “Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance?”, has been accepted to FSE!

April 2020

• Invited to ASE Program Committee.
• One paper, “A Case Study of Software Security Red Teams at Microsoft”, has been accepted to VL/HCC!

March 2020

• Invited to the ICPC Program Committee.
• Invited to the ICPC Industry Track Program Committee.
• Invited to the VL/HCC Program Committee.

January 2020

• Our paper, “Debugging Hiring: What Went Right and What Went Wrong in the Technical Interview Process”, has been accepted to ICSE SEIS!

December 2019

• Two papers have been accepted to CHI!
• Our paper, “Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?” has been accepted to ICSE!
• The PROSE team is moving to DevDiv!

August 2017

• Joined PROSE team at Microsoft, with research focus on PL+HCI.