Abstract:

Traditional text-based programming environments present users with significant mental hurdles as well as tedious, inefficient workflows. In this talk, I'll describe techniques that aim to improve the user interfaces for programming. What new capabilities can programming languages offer to users, and what new interaction mechanisms can be used to expose the new capabilities?

We are developing prototype programming environments, called Sketch-n-Sketch and Hazel, to explore these questions. Regarding capabilities, we have developed techniques for "bidirectionally" developing and evaluating programs. Regarding interaction mechanisms, we have developed "direct manipulation" interfaces for interacting with programs and their execution. These systems augment traditional text-based programming with new program development workflows, which we plan to further improve and evaluate in the future.

Bio:

Ravi Chugh has been Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago since 2014. His research and teaching interests revolve around programming language technology --- type systems, synthesis algorithms, and other program analysis techniques --- particularly as they relate to challenges in software engineering and human-computer interaction. Ravi received an NSF CAREER Award in 2017, and a Neubauer Fellowship from the University of Chicago in 2015 for innovative and effective undergraduate teaching. Ravi obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2013.