Variation Lab Human-Computer Interaction @SEAS

Publications

* = equal contribution

2026

How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined Abstractions

Jingyue Zhang, J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Elena L. Glassman, Damien Masson, Ian Arawjo

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2026)

DOI Paper

A Paradigm for Creative Ownership

Tejaswi Polimetla, Katy Ilonka Gero, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2026)

DOI Paper Explore

Meta-HCI: Practising Reflection in HCI Research

Annika Kaltenhauser, James Peter Arnéra, Amelie Unger, Sophia Ppali, Niels van Berkel, Benjamin Tag, Elena L. Glassman, Phoebe Sengers, Simo Hosio, Jonas Oppenlaender

Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2026)

DOI Paper

Science and Technology for Augmenting Reading (STAR)

Tal August, Andrew Head, Alexa Siu, Elena L. Glassman, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Joseph Chee Chang, Lucy Lu Wang, Marti A. Hearst

Workshop at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2026)

DOI Paper

2025

Interface Design to Support Legal Reading and Writing: Insights from Interviews with Legal Experts

Chelse Swoopes, Ziwei Gu, Elena L. Glassman

arXiv 2025

Paper

AbstractExplorer: Leveraging Structure-Mapping Theory to Enhance Comparative Close Reading at Scale

Ziwei Gu, Joyce Zhou, Nina Lei, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Mahmood Jasim, Narges Mahyar, Elena L. Glassman

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST 2025)

DOI Paper

Semantic Commit: Helping Users Update Intent Specifications for AI Memory at Scale

Priyan Vaithilingam, Munyeong Kim, Frida-Cecilia Acosta-Parenteau, Daniel Lee, Amine Mhedhbi, Elena L. Glassman, Ian Arawjo

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST 2025)

DOI Paper

Law is vulnerable to AI influence; interface design can help

Aileen Nielsen, Chelse Swoopes, Elena L. Glassman

SSRN 2025

Paper

Leveraging Variation Theory in Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Optimized Active Learning

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Kuangshi Ai, Zheng Zhang, Elena L. Glassman(Co-last corresponding author), Toby Jia-Jun Li(Co-last corresponding author)

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Proc. Findings of ACL 2025)

DOI Paper

CorpusStudio: Surfacing Emergent Patterns In A Corpus Of Prior Work While Writing

Hai Dang, Chelse Swoopes, Daniel Buschek, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2025)

DOI Paper Explore

Supporting Co-Adaptive Machine Teaching through Human Concept Learning and Cognitive Theories

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Yukun Yang, Elena L. Glassman(Co-last corresponding author), Toby Jia-Jun Li(Co-last corresponding author)

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2025)

Best Paper Award

DOI Paper

Creative Writers' Attitudes on Writing as Training Data for Large Language Models

Katy Ilonka Gero, Meera Desai, Carly Schnitzler, Nayun Eom, Jack Cushman, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2025)

Best Paper Award

DOI Paper

2024

Why Do Skimmers Perform Better with Grammar-Preserving Text Saliency Modulation (GP-TSM)? Evidence from an Eye Tracking Study

Ziwei Gu, Owen Raymond, Naser Al Madi, Elena L. Glassman

Late-Breaking Work at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2024)

DOI Paper

Supporting Sensemaking of Large Language Model Outputs at Scale

Katy Ilonka Gero, Chelse Swoopes, Ziwei Gu, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2024)

Honorable Mention Award

DOI Paper

DynaVis: Dynamically Synthesized UI Widgets for Visualization Editing

Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L. Glassman, Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2024)

Best Paper Award

DOI Paper

Reliability Criteria for News Websites

Hendrik Heuer, Elena L. Glassman

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI 2024)

DOI Paper

Syntaktis: A Large-Language-Model-Backed Editing Interface for Supporting Ethical Journalism Practices

Leah J. Teichholtz, Katy Ilonka Gero, Elena L. Glassman

Computation + Journalism Symposium (C+J 2024)

Paper

On Interpretability and Overreliance

Julian Skirzynski, Elena L. Glassman, Berk Ustun

Interpretable AI: Past, Present and Future Workshop at NeurIPS (InterpretableAI @ NeurIPS 2024)

Paper

2023

AtomXR: Streamlined XR Prototyping with Natural Language and Immersive Physical Interaction

Alice Cai, Caine Ardayfio, AnhPhu Nguyen, Tica Lin, Elena L. Glassman

arXiv 2023

Paper

Where to Hide a Stolen Elephant: Leaps in Creative Writing with Multimodal Machine Intelligence

Nikhil Singh, Guillermo Bernal, Daria Savchenko, Elena L. Glassman

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI 2023)

DOI Paper

Designing Interfaces for Human-Computer Communication: An On-Going Collection of Considerations

Elena L. Glassman

arXiv 2023

Paper

Accessible Text Tools for People with Cognitive Impairments and Non-Native Readers: Challenges and Opportunities

Hendrik Heuer, Elena L. Glassman

Mensch und Computer (Proc. MuC 2023)

DOI Paper

Towards More Effective AI-Assisted Programming: A Systematic Design Exploration to Improve Visual Studio IntelliCode's User Experience

Priyan Vaithilingam, Elena L. Glassman, Peter Groenwegen, Sumit Gulwani, Austin Z. Henley, Rohan Malpani, David Pugh, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, Joey Wang, Aaron Yim

IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (Proc. ICSE-SEIP 2023)

DOI Paper

PaTAT: Human-AI Collaborative Qualitative Coding with Explainable Interactive Rule Synthesis

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Zheng Zhang, Xiaohang Tang, Yihao Meng, Elena L. Glassman, Toby Jia-Jun Li

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2023)

DOI Paper

Human-Computer Interaction and AI: What practitioners need to know to design and build effective AI system from a human perspective

Daniel Russell, Q. Vera Liao, Chinmay Kulkarni, Elena L. Glassman, Nikolas Martelaro

Course at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2023)

DOI Paper Materials

Accessible Text Tools: Where They Are Needed & What They Should Look Like

Hendrik Heuer, Elena L. Glassman

Late-Breaking Work at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2023)

DOI Paper

Varying How We Teach: Adding Contrast Helps Humans Learn about Robot Motions

Tiffany Horter, Elena L. Glassman, Julie Shah, Serena Booth

Human-Interactive Robot Learning Workshop at HRI (HIRL @ HRI 2023)

Paper

An Interactive UI to Support Sensemaking over Collections of Parallel Texts

Joyce Zhou, Elena L. Glassman, Daniel S. Weld

arXiv 2023

Paper

2022

Metric Elicitation; Moving from Theory to Practice

Safinah Ali, Sohini Upadhyay, Gaurush Hiranandani, Elena L. Glassman, Oluwasanmi Koyejo

arXiv 2022

Paper Explore

Concept-Annotated Examples for Library Comparison

Litao Yan, Miryung Kim, Björn Hartmann, Tianyi Zhang, Elena L. Glassman

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST 2022)

DOI Paper

Do Explanations Increase the Effectiveness of AI-Crowd Generated Fake News Warnings?

Ziv Epstein, Nicolo Foppiani, Sophie Hilgard, Sanjana Sharma, Elena L. Glassman, David Rand

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Proc. ICWSM 2022)

DOI Paper

A Selective Summary of Where to Hide a Stolen Elephant: Leaps in Creative Writing with Multimodal Machine Intelligence

Nikhil Singh, Guillermo Bernal, Daria Savchenko, Elena L. Glassman

Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants at ACL (In2Writing @ ACL 2022)

DOI Paper

Expectation vs. Experience: Evaluating the Usability of Code Generation Tools Powered by Large Language Models

Priyan Vaithilingam, Tianyi Zhang, Elena L. Glassman

Late-Breaking Work at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2022)

DOI Paper

A Comparative Evaluation of Interventions Against Misinformation: Augmenting the WHO Checklist

Hendrik Heuer, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2022)

DOI Paper

Revisiting Human-Robot Teaching and Learning Through the Lens of Human Concept Learning

Serena Booth, Sanjana Sharma, Sarah Chung, Julie Shah, Elena L. Glassman

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Proc. HRI 2022)

DOI Paper

2021

Loopholes: a Window into Value Alignment and the Learning of Meaning

Sophie Bridgers, Elena L. Glassman, Laura Schulz, Tomer Ullman

Meaning in Context Workshop at NeurIPS (MiC @ NeurIPS 2021)

Paper Materials

Interactive Cohort Analysis and Hypothesis Discovery by Exploring Temporal Patterns in Population-Level Health Records

Tianyi Zhang, Thomas H. McCoy Jr., Roy H. Perlis, Finale Doshi-Velez, Elena L. Glassman

Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare at IEEE VIS (VAHC @ VIS 2021)

Honorable Mention Award

DOI Paper

Evaluating the Interpretability of Generative Models by Interactive Reconstruction

Andrew Slavin Ross, Nina Chen, Elisa Zhao Hang, Elena L. Glassman, Finale Doshi-Velez

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2021)

Honorable Mention Award

DOI Paper Code

2020

Exempla Gratis (E.G.): Code Examples for Free

Celeste Barnaby, Koushik Sen, Tianyi Zhang, Elena L. Glassman, Satish Chandra

ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Industry Track (Proc. ESEC/FSE 2020)

DOI Paper

Interactive Program Synthesis by Augmented Examples

Tianyi Zhang, London Lowmanstone, Xinyu Wang, Elena L. Glassman

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST 2020)

DOI Paper

Enabling Data-Driven API Design with Community Usage Data: A Need-Finding Study

Tianyi Zhang, Björn Hartmann, Miryung Kim, Elena L. Glassman

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2020)

DOI Paper

Proxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI Systems

Zana Buçinca, Phoebe Lin, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Elena L. Glassman

ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (Proc. IUI 2020)

Best Paper Award

DOI Paper

Triangulating the News: Visualizing Commonality and Variation Across Many News Stories on the Same Event

Elena L. Glassman, Janet Sung, Katherine Qian, Yuri Vishnevsky, Amy Zhang

Computation + Journalism Symposium (C+J 2020)

Paper

2019

Approaching Polyglot Programming: What Can We Learn from Bilingualism Studies?

Rebecca L. Hao, Elena L. Glassman

Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2019)

DOI Paper

Characterizing Developer Use of Automatically Generated Patches

José Pablo Cambronero, Jiasi Shen, Jürgen Cito, Elena L. Glassman, Martin Rinard

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (Proc. VL/HCC 2019)

DOI Paper

2018

Visualizing API Usage Examples at Scale

Elena L. Glassman, Tianyi Zhang, Björn Hartmann, Miryung Kim

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2018)

DOI Paper Code

Interactive Extraction of Examples from Existing Code

Andrew Head, Elena L. Glassman, Björn Hartmann, Marti A. Hearst

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2018)

Honorable Mention Award

DOI Paper

2017

TraceDiff: Debugging Unexpected Code Behavior Using Trace Divergences

Ryo Suzuki, Gustavo Soares, Andrew Head, Elena L. Glassman, Ruan Reis, Melina Mongiovi, Loris D'Antoni, Björn Hartmann

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (Proc. VL/HCC 2017)

DOI Paper Code

Exploring the Design Space of Automatically Synthesized Hints for Introductory Programming Assignments

Ryo Suzuki, Gustavo Soares, Elena L. Glassman, Andrew Head, Loris D'Antoni, Björn Hartmann

Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI EA 2017)

DOI

Writing Reusable Code Feedback at Scale with Mixed-Initiative Program Synthesis

Andrew Head, Elena L. Glassman, Gustavo Soares, Ryo Suzuki, Lucas Figueredo, Loris D'Antoni, Björn Hartmann

ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (Proc. L@S 2017)

DOI Paper

Teamscope: Scalable Team Evaluation via Automated Metric Mining for Communication, Organization, Execution, and Evolution

An Ju, Elena L. Glassman, Armando Fox

ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (Proc. L@S 2017)

DOI

Clustering LaTeX Solutions to Machine Learning Assignments for Rapid Assessment

Sindy Tan, Finale Doshi-Velez, Juan Quiroz, Elena L. Glassman

Machine Learning for Education Workshop at KDD (KDD Workshop 2017)

Paper

2016

Making Static Lessons Adaptive through Crowdsourcing & Machine Learning

Joseph Jay Williams, Juho Kim, Elena L. Glassman, Anna Rafferty, Walter Lasecki

Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Domain Modeling (Book Chapter 2016)

Learnersourcing Personalized Hints

Elena L. Glassman, Aaron Lin, Carrie Cai, Robert Miller

ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Proc. CSCW 2016)

DOI Paper

Leveraging Learners for Teaching Programming and Hardware Design at Scale

Elena L. Glassman, Robert Miller

Companion of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Proc. CSCW Companion 2016)

DOI

DocMatrix: Self-Teaching from Multiple Sources

Elena L. Glassman, Daniel M. Russell

ASIS&T Annual Meeting (Proc. ASIS&T 2016)

DOI

Learning Latent Student Design Decisions in Python Programming Classes

Elena L. Glassman

Workshop on Machine Learning for Digital Education and Assessment Systems at ICML (ICML Workshop 2016)

Learning Latent Student Design Decisions in Massive Python Programming Classes

Elena L. Glassman

New England Machine Learning Day (NEML 2016)

Scaling Up Qualitative Data Analysis With Interfaces Powered by Interpretable Machine Learning

Elena L. Glassman, Been Kim, Julie Shah

Human-Centered Data Science Workshop at CSCW (HCDS @ CSCW 2016)

2015

Foobaz: Variable Name Feedback for Student Code at Scale

Elena L. Glassman, Lyla Fischer, Jeremy Scott, Robert C. Miller

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST 2015)

DOI Paper

Mudslide: A Spatially Anchored Census of Student Confusion for Online Lecture Videos

Elena L. Glassman, Juho Kim, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Meredith Ringel Morris

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2015)

Honorable Mention Award

DOI Paper

RIMES: Embedding Interactive Multimedia Exercises in Lecture Videos

Juho Kim, Elena L. Glassman, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Meredith Ringel Morris

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Proc. CHI 2015)

DOI Paper

iBCM: Interactive Bayesian Case Model Empowering Humans via Intuitive Interaction

Been Kim, Elena L. Glassman, Brittney Johnson, Julie Shah

MIT CSAIL Technical Report (CSAIL TR 2015)

Paper

Learner-Sourcing in an Engineering Class at Scale

Elena L. Glassman, Christopher J. Terman, Robert C. Miller

ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (Proc. L@S 2015)

DOI Paper

OverCode: Visualizing Variation in Student Solutions to Programming Problems at Scale

Elena L. Glassman, Jeremy Scott, Rishabh Singh, Philip Guo, Robert C. Miller

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI 2015)

DOI Paper Explore

2014

Interacting with Massive Numbers of Student Solutions

Elena L. Glassman

Adjunct Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (Proc. UIST Adjunct 2014)

DOI

Feature Engineering for Clustering Student Solutions

Elena L. Glassman, Rishabh Singh, Robert C. Miller

ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (Proc. L@S 2014)

DOI Paper

2013

Toward Facilitating Assistance to Students Attempting Engineering Design Problems

Elena L. Glassman, Ned Gulley, Robert C. Miller

ACM International Computing Education Research Conference (Proc. ICER 2013)

DOI Paper