Tessa Lau's Research

My fundamental interest lies in the marriage of AI and human-computer interaction. I seek to use AI techniques to make computing systems easier to use. Current interfaces require users to learn to speak the language of the system in order to do their work. I believe that by incorporating ideas from knowledge representation, learning, and planning into the interface, we can create user-oriented systems that are easy to use, personalized, and adapt to best serve the needs and goals of their users.

My thesis work concentrated on applying machine learning to the problem of programming by demonstration (PBD), culminating in the design of the SMARTedit system for automating repetitive text-editing tasks. PBD has the potential to make computers easier to use by allowing any user to automate repetitive tasks simply by demonstrating the task on concrete examples.

I'm currently leading the CoScripter project to build a wikipedia for how-to knowledge.

Publications

• Tessa Lau, Clemens Drews, Jeffrey Nichols. Interpreting Written How-To Instructions, to appear in IJCAI 2009, Pasadena, CA, July 2009.
• Jeffrey Bigham, Tessa Lau, Jeffrey Nichols. TrailBlazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web, IUI 2009, Sanibel Island, FL, February 2009.
• James Lin, Jeffrey Wong, Jeffrey Nichols, Allen Cypher, Tessa Lau. End-User Programming of Mashups with Vegemite, IUI 2009, Sanibel Island, FL, Februrary 2009.
• Gilly Leshed, Eben Haber, Tara Matthews, Tessa Lau. CoScripter: Automating & Sharing How-To Knowledge in the Enterprise, CHI 2008, Florence, Italy, April 2008. (Best paper nomination)
• Tessa Lau. Why PBD systems fail: Lessons learned for usable AI, CHI 2008 Workshop on Usable AI, Florence, Italy, April 2008.
• Jeffrey Nichols and Tessa Lau. Mobilization by Demonstration: Using Traces to Re-author Existing Web Sites, IUI 2008, Canary Islands, Spain, January 2008.
• Gilly Leshed, Eben Haber, Tessa Lau, and Allen Cypher. CoScripter: Sharing `How-to' Knowledge in the Enterprise, GROUP 2007, Sanibel Island, FL, November 2007.
• Stephen Farrell, Tessa Lau, Eric Wilcox, Stefan Nusser, Michael Muller. Socially Augmenting Employee Profiles with People-Tagging, UIST 2007, Newport, RI, October 2007.
• G. Little, T. Lau, A. Cypher, J. Lin, E. Haber, E. Kandogan, Koala: Capture, Share, Automate, Personalize Business Processes on the Web, CHI 2007, San Jose, CA, April 2007.
• A. Cozzi, S. Farrell, T. Lau, B. A. Smith, C. Drews, J. Lin, B. Stachel, and T. P. Moran, Activity management as a Web service, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 45, no. 4, 2006.
• Nicholas Kushmerick, Tessa Lau, Mark Dredze, Rinat Khoussainov, Activity-Centric Email: A Machine Learning Approach, AAAI 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006.
• Stephen Farrell and Tessa Lau, Fringe Contacts: People-Tagging for the Enterprise, Workshop on Collaborative Web Tagging, WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland, May 2006.
• Mark Dredze, Tessa Lau, Nicholas Kushmerick, Automatically Classifying Emails into Activities, IUI 2006, Sydney, Australia, January 2006.
• Lawrence Bergman, Vittorio Castelli, Tessa Lau, and Daniel Oblinger, DocWizards: a system for authoring follow-me documentation wizards, UIST 2005, Seattle, WA, October 2005.
• Daniel Oblinger, Vittorio Castelli, Tessa Lau, and Lawrence Bergman, Similarity-based alignment and generalization, ECML 2005, Porto, Portugal, October, 2005.
• Catalina Danis, Wendy Kellogg, Tessa Lau, Mark Dredze, Jeffrey Stylos, and Nicholas Kushmerick, Managers' email: beyond tasks and to-dos, CHI 2005, Portland OR, April 2005.
• Nicholas Kushmerick and Tessa Lau, Automated Email Activity Management: An Unsupervised Learning Approach, IUI 2005, San Diego, CA, January 2005. (Honorable Mention for Outstanding Paper Award)
• Tessa Lau, Lawrence Bergman, Vittorio Castelli, and Daniel Oblinger, Programming shell scripts by demonstration, Workshop on Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems, AAAI 2004, San Jose, CA, July 2004.
• Miryung Kim, Lawrence Bergman, Tessa Lau, and David Notkin, An Ethnographic Study of Copy and Paste Programming Practices in OOPL, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2004).
• Tessa Lau, Lawrence Bergman, Vittorio Castelli, Daniel Oblinger, Sheepdog: Learning Procedures for Technical Support, IUI 2004, Madeira, Portugal, January 2004.
• Tessa Lau, Pedro Dominogs, and Dan Weld, Learning Programs from Traces using Version Space Algebra, K-CAP 2003, Sanibel Island, FL, October 2003.
• Tessa Lau, Daniel Oblinger, Lawrence Bergman, Vittorio Castelli, and Corin Anderson, Learning Procedures for Autonomic Computing, Workshop on AI and Autonomic Computing, IJCAI 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003.
• Daniel S. Weld, Corin Anderson, Pedro Domingos, Oren Etzioni, Krzysztof Gajos, Tessa Lau, Steve Wolfman, Automatically Personalizing User Interfaces, IJCAI 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003.
• Pedro Domingos, Yeuhi Abe, Corin Anderson, AnHai Doan, Dieter Fox, Alon Halevy, Geoff Hulten, Henry Kautz, Tessa Lau, Lin Liao, Jayant Madhavan, Mausam, Don Patterson, Matthew Richardson, Sumit Sanghai, Daniel Weld, Steve Wolfman, Research on Statistical Relational Learning at the University of Washington, Workshop on Learning Statistical Models from Relational Data, IJCAI 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, August 2003.
• Lawrence Bergman, Tessa Lau, Vittorio Castelli, and Daniel Oblinger, Personal Wizards: collaborative end-user programming, Workshop on End User Development, CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, FL, April 2003.
• Yves Gaeremynck, Lawrence Bergman, and Tessa Lau, MORE for less: Model Recovery from Visual Interfaces for Multi-Device Application Design, IUI 2003, Miami Beach, FL, January 2003.
• Tessa Lau, Programming by Demonstration: a Machine Learning Approach, PhD thesis, University of Washington, 2001.
• Tessa Lau, Steven Wolfman, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld, Programming by Demonstration using Version Space Algebra, Machine Learning, 2003.
• Steven Wolfman, Tessa Lau, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld, Mixed Initiative Interfaces for Learning Tasks: SMARTedit Talks Back, IUI 2001.
• Tessa Lau, Steven Wolfman, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld, Learning Repetitive Text-editing Procedures with SMARTedit, in Lieberman, ed., Your Wish is My Command: Giving Users the Power to Instruct their Software, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.
• Tessa Lau, Pedro Domingos, and Daniel S. Weld, Version Space Algebra and its Application to Programming by Demonstration, ICML 2000, Stanford, CA, June 2000, pp. 527-534.
• Tessa Lau and Eric Horvitz, Patterns of Search: Analyzing and Modeling Web Query Refinement, Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on User Modelling (UM99), Banff, Canada, June 1999.
• Tessa Lau, A comparison of sequence-learning approaches: implications for intelligent user interfaces, University of Washington Generals Examination, February, 1999.
• Tessa Lau and Daniel S. Weld, Programming by Demonstration: an Inductive Learning Formulation, IUI '99, Redondo Beach, CA, January 1999.
• Tessa Lau, Oren Etzioni, and Daniel S. Weld, Privacy Interfaces for Information Management, CACM 42(10):88-94.