Programmatic and Direct Manipulation, Together at Last

Direct manipulation interfaces and programmatic systems have distinct and complementary strengths. The former provide intuitive, immediate visual feedback and enable rapid prototyping, whereas the latter enable complex, reusable abstractions. Unfortunately, existing systems typically force users into just one of these two interaction modes. We present a system called Sketch-n-Sketch that integrates programmatic and direct manipulation for the particular domain of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). In Sketch-n-Sketch, the user writes a program to generate an output SVG canvas. Then the user may directly manipulate the canvas while the system immediately infers a program update in order to match the changes to the output, a workflow we call live synchronization. To achieve this, we propose (i) a technique called trace-based program synthesis that takes program execution history into account in order to constrain the search space and (ii) heuristics for dealing with ambiguities. Based on our experience with examples spanning 2,000 lines of code and from the results of a preliminary user study, we believe that Sketch-n-Sketch provides a novel workflow that can augment traditional programming systems. Our approach may serve as the basis for live synchronization in other application domains, as well as a starting point for yet more ambitious ways of combining programmatic and direct manipulation.Comment: PLDI 2016 Paper + Supplementary Appendice

TopExNet: Entity-Centric Network Topic Exploration in News Streams

The recent introduction of entity-centric implicit network representations of unstructured text offers novel ways for exploring entity relations in document collections and streams efficiently and interactively. Here, we present TopExNet as a tool for exploring entity-centric network topics in streams of news articles. The application is available as a web service at https://topexnet.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/ .Comment: Published in Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2019, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, February 11-15, 201

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Analyzing equivalalences in discourse: are discourse theory and membership categorization analysis comptatible

Facing a crucial leap from political philosophy to empirical analysis, the approach to discourse analysis that arose in the aftermath of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), and that is currently known as the Essex school of discourse theory (DT), has in recent years repeatedly been accused of suffering from a methodological deficit. This paper examines to what extent membership categorization analysis (MCA), a branch of ethnomethodology that investigates lay actors' situated descriptions-in-context as practical activity, can play a part in rendering poststructuralist DT notions such as articulation and equivalence analytically tangible in empirically observable discourse. Based on a review of Laclau and Mouffe's foundational text as well as on Glynos and Howarth's recent exposition of the framework (2007), it is argued that MCA empirically substantiates many poststructuralist claims about the indeterminacy of signification. However, MCA consistently falters - and willingly so - at the point where DT would articulate emerging equivalences between identity categories as part of a second-order explanatory concept, such as Glynos and Howarth’s notion of political logic. Nevertheless, MCA also contains the kernel of an "endogenous" notion of the political that comes fairly close to DT’s all-pervasive understanding of the concept. To support these arguments, a variety of empirical sources are mobilized, ranging from the transcript of a political talk show, a newspaper report regarding a discrimination case in a dance class, to data drawn from earlier research on the way that minority members are treated by the Belgian criminal justice system

Post Lecture Review

Many different systems are available to seek student evaluation of a course. However, this evaluation is typically only done at the end of the course; this limits its usefulness. This project develops the concept of getting student feedback throughout the course, in order to assist students in providing earlier feedback to the professor. This prototype is integrated with Canvas, so the system has access to already existing course information, as well as the means to send questionnaires