Physical construction and assembly tasks are often carried out by groups of collocated workers, and they can be difficult to coordinate. Group members must spend time deciding how to split up the task, how to assign subtasks to each other, and in what order subtasks should be completed. WeBuild is a task distribution system that dynamically assigns subtasks to workers in a group, taking into account factors such as the dependencies between subtasks and the skills of each group member. Each worker views personalized step-by-step instructions on a mobile phone, while a dashboard visualizes the entire process.

Publication:

WeBuild: Automatically Distributing Assembly Tasks Among Collocated Workers to Improve Coordination. Proceedings of CHI '17.

Collaborators:

Tovi Grossman, George Fitzmaurice.

Complex software offers power for experts, yet overwhelms new users. Novices often do not know how to execute tasks, what they want to achieve, or even what is possible. To address this, we introduce the DiscoverySpace interface for executable action suggestions. DiscoverySpace is a prototype extension panel for Adobe Photoshop that suggests task-level action macros to apply to photographs based on visual features. DiscoverySpace harvests these one-click actions from the online Photoshop user community. A between-subjects study indicated that action suggestions may help novices maintain confidence, accomplish tasks, and discover features. This work demonstrates how interfaces can leverage user-generated content to help novices navigate complex software.

Publications:

DiscoverySpace: Suggesting Actions in Complex Software. Proceedings of DIS ’16.

DiscoverySpace: Crowdsourced Suggestions Onboard Novices in Complex Software. CSCW ’16 Companion. (Extended Abstract) -- Demo

Collaborators:

Mira Dontcheva, Holger Winnemöller, Sheryl Ehrlich, Scott Klemmer.

Framing of a peer review task can significantly impact reviews. In this 3-part study, subtle feature changes in rubrics, task structure, and artifact representation resulted in reviews that were significantly different in both the quality and focus of reviewer feedback.

As part of this project, I built a website to host our first study, where graduate school applicants were invited to submit their application essay and give feedback to each other using PeerStudio.

See the Framing Feedback Project Website.

Publications:

Framing Feedback: Choosing Review Environment Features that Support High Quality Peer Assessment. Proceedings of CHI ’16.

Do numeric ratings impact peer reviewers? Learning at Scale, Vancouver, BC. (Extended Abstract) -- Poster

Collaborators:

Catherine Hicks, Vineet Pandey, Purvi Desai, Scott Klemmer.

 

 

As part of the Design Lab's Human-Centered Healthcare Design initiative, I worked with Nadir Weibel in collaboration with UCSD Radiation Oncology and conducted observations to understand their current system and explore technological improvements.

Read about the Design Lab's healthcare initiatives here.

 

 

The ability to interactively edit materials in a rendered scene is important for graphic artists and designers. Rather than adjusting the values of parameters for an analytic BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) model, a more intuitive method would be to paint edits directly on the rendered image and interactively see results. For my project with Ravi Ramamoorthi, I explored the challenges and possibilities for building such an intuitive BRDF editing system.

Read my final report here.

As our project for CSE218 (Advanced Topics in Software Engineering: Ubiquitous Computing), my group built a system called SpeedyType for people who suffer from locked in syndrome to type messages using only their eyes. Our system also included a piano keyboard for playing music using the eyes. See a video of our demo here.

I worked as a research assistant for Kyros Kutulakos in the Dynamic Graphics Project lab at the University of Toronto. I studied BRDF acquisition and visual texture analysis, and extended an existing “primal-dual coding” camera system to isolate light transport based on the direction and distance of travel.