As an HCI researcher, I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from the PL community while building novel PL-powered interactive systems. For the first portion of this talk, I will briefly review a selection of the PL + HCI systems I have helped build over the years to illustrate how user-centered interface design can make a huge impact on the usefulness and usability of both novel and existing PL technology, especially program synthesis. For the second portion of the talk, I have invited Nadia Polikarpova to chat with me about the challenges she and other PL researchers experience when building for humans.

Elena Glassman is an assistant professor of computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She specializes in human-computer interaction. She leads a research group with the aim of augmenting human intelligence with computation—by building better interfaces for bidirectional communication with computers about large code and data corpora.

Glassman earned a PhD and MEng in electrical engineering and computer science and a BS in electrical science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a research intern at both Google and Microsoft Research and has received the Berkeley Institute for Data Science fellowship, both the NSF and NDSEG graduate fellowships, and the MIT Amar Bose Teaching Fellowship. She also received the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and the MIT EECS Oral Master’s Thesis Presentation Award, among others. Glassman’s work has been featured in numerous media including the New York Times, Wired, CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, and CNN’s American Morning.