Session 1: Intelligent Interfaces

Thirty Years of Trying to Make Programming Easier for Everyone

Brad A. Myers   [Website]

Professor, Human Computer Interaction Institute School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:
One theme of my research through the years, including my PhD at DGP, has been trying to make programming easier. I have worked on various approaches, including visualization, programming by example, visual programming, software frameworks and toolkits, interactive editors, and making programming more natural. We have targeted professional programmers, novice programmers (who are trying to learn to be professionals), and people we now call "end-user programmers" -- who find programming useful but for whom programming is not their main job. Along the way, we have created about 50 systems whose names are silly acronyms. This talk will summarize what we have learned and the challenges still ahead.

Bio:
Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an ACM Fellow, and a member of the CHI Academy, an honor bestowed on the principal leaders of the field. He is the principal investigator for the Pebbles Handheld Computer Project and the Natural Programming Project, and previously led the Amulet and Garnet projects. He is the author or editor of over 325 publications, including the books "Creating User Interfaces by Demonstration" and "Languages for Developing User Interfaces," and he has been on the editorial board of five journals. He has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation to over 50 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface design and software. Myers received a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto where he developed the Peridot user interface tool. He received the MS and BSc degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during which time he was a research intern at Xerox PARC. From 1980 until 1983, he worked at PERQ Systems Corporation. His research interests include user interface development systems, user interfaces, handheld computers, programming environments, programming language design, programming by example, visual programming, interaction techniques, and window management. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and also belongs to SIGCHI, ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.