Tomorrow, Wed 1pm, Sarah Chasins (UC Berkeley) will be speaking at our seminar.
Democratizing Web Automation: Programming for Social Scientists and Other Domain Experts
We have promised social scientists a data revolution, but it hasnât arrived. What stands between practitioners and the data-driven insights they want? Acquiring the data. In particular, acquiring the social media, online forum, and other web data that was supposed to help them produce big, rich, ecologically valid datasets. Web automation programming is resistant to high-level abstractions, so end-user programmers end up stymied by the need to reverse engineer website internalsâDOM, _javascript_, AJAX. Programming by Demonstration (PBD) offered one promising avenue towards democratizing web automation. Unfortunately, as the web matured, the programs became too complex for PBD tools to synthesize, and web PBD progress stalled.
In this talk, Iâll 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. Iâll conclude with predictions about the abstraction-resistant domains that will fall nextârobotics, analysis of unstructured texts, image processingâand how hybrid PL-HCI breakthroughs will vastly expand access to programming.
Bio:
Sarah Chasins is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research interests lie at the intersection of programming languages and human-computer interaction. Much of her work is shaped by collaborations with social scientists, data scientists, and other non-traditional programmers.
Topic: madPL seminar
Time: This is a recurring meeting Meet anytime
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Meeting ID: 859 451 761
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Meeting ID: 859 451 761
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