"Collaborative Scripting for the Web"
Tessa Lau

As more areas of our lives move to the web, we are seeing an increasing need for sharing knowledge about how to do tasks on the web. For example, people want to show their parents how to upload photos, biologists want to show colleagues how to analyze data, and employees need to know how to order business cards.

Our CoScripter system employs techniques from programming by demonstration to make it easy for end users to capture, share, and automate scripts for completing web-based tasks. One differentiating feature is that scripts are automatically saved to a shared wiki repository, where others in the community can find, tag, rate, and comment on scripts.

CoScripter has been deployed within a large organization for nearly a year, and recently made available on the Internet for public use. In this talk, I will explain the technology behind CoScripter, report on the results of user studies that show how CoScripter has improved people's lives, and highlight lessons we learned while deploying a research project on the web for public consumption.

Bio:

Tessa Lau is a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Her work centers on intelligent user interfaces, a cross-disciplinary field that sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Her research focuses on programming by demonstration, whose goal is to enable regular end users to automate routine tasks simply by demonstrating to the computer what it should do. She recently served as Program Co-chair of IUI 2007, the international conference on intelligent user interfaces. Tessa completed her PhD at the University of Washington in 2001, spent four years at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center just north of New York City, and moved to California in late 2005 to be closer to family and friends. Outside of work, Tessa pursues a variety of interests including knitting, inline skating, and flying remote-controlled model airplanes.