Novel Interfaces to Support Human Intent Formation and Communication to Humans and Computers Alike

A presentation from 2021–2022 Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor Elena L. Glassman

Elena L. Glassman is the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She specializes in human-computer interaction and leads a research group that aims to augment human intelligence with computation.

During her fellowship, Glassman is focusing on formalizing and generalizing a novel type of information visualization that facilitates human insight and intent formation about semi-structured data and, where applicable, the expression of that intent to a computer. This type of information visualization has been instrumental to the success of Glassman’s past programming-related interfaces, and she intends to extend it to new domains; e.g., privacy policies, news articles, electronic health records, and scientific abstracts. The goal is to help lay people and experts in various domains perceive previously unseeable patterns and distributions over alternative choices that were previously prohibitively time-consuming to investigate.

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