CAREER: End-user Programming for Web Automation and Visualization

最终用户编程旨在帮助没有接受过正式编程培训的人利用他们计算机系统的强大功能。 据估计，到2005年，美国最终用户程序员的人数预计将达到5 500万，而专业程序员只有275万。 不幸的是，封闭的、不可定制的应用程序长期以来一直是最终用户在桌面上编程的严重障碍。 最近应用程序向Web的迁移开辟了一个新的机会前景，因为在桌面上关闭和不可定制的应用程序在为Web实现时会产生许多用于定制的钩子。 在这个项目中，PI将寻求通过开发新的界面设计、表示、算法和工具来推进最终用户的自动化和Web定制。 这项研究将包括从很少的例子中学习包装器（识别网页组件的模式）的基本进展，以便用户可以通过点击和点击来演示Web自动化。 将开发语言和技术，使用户能够定制网站，而无需检查其源代码。 将建立一个安全的环境，以便脱机测试和调试网络自动化，并将设计各种技术，使多个网站无缝地结合在一起，以便一个网站显示的网页自动包括另一个网站提供的上下文敏感信息。 这些基本的贡献将成为最终用户定制网站的基础，使其更具可读性，更容易用于频繁的任务，并适合在Web浏览器中完成的排序和过滤等操作。 这项研究的顶峰应用将是一套工具，支持收集网络信息以推动个人决策，如买车，找房子或选择工作。 为了实现这些目标，PI将开发新的算法，用于推断与Web交互并从Web提取信息的模式和脚本，设计和评估定制用户Web体验的新方法，并寻求更深入地了解人们如何获取Web信息以做出个人决策。该项目的成果将使最终用户能够更好地控制其浏览体验的可访问性和性能，为他们提供更多的工具，以便就重要问题做出信息驱动的决策，个人和公共的，如教育，医疗保健，公共政策，安全和环境。 由PI开发的软件将作为开放源码工具免费发布，供公众使用，并作为最终用户编程的其他研究人员的基础设施。 该项目还将使麻省理工学院计算机科学专业的一代毕业生接触人机交互的原理和技术，以便他们在软件行业和学术界的职业生涯中产生更多可用的软件;相关的课程材料将作为麻省理工学院开放式课程计划的一部分，免费，开放，公开使用。

End-user programming seeks to help people with no formal training in programming take advantage of the power of their computer systems. By one estimate, the number of end-user programmers in the United States is expected to reach 55 million by 2005, compared to only 2.75 million professional programmers. Unfortunately, closed, uncustomizable applications have long been a serious obstacle for end-user programming on the desktop. The recent migration of applications to the Web opens up a new vista of opportunity, in that applications that would have been closed and uncustomizable on the desktop sprout numerous hooks for customization when implemented for the Web. In this project, the PI will seek to advance end-user automation and customization of the Web, by developing new interface designs, representations, algorithms, and tools. The research will include fundamental advances in learning wrappers (patterns that identify components of web pages) from very few examples, so that users can demonstrate web automation by pointing and clicking. Languages and techniques will be developed that allow users to customize web sites without examining their source code. A safe environment for offline testing and debugging of web automation will be implemented, and techniques for integrating multiple web sites together seamlessly, so that pages displayed by one site automatically include context-sensitive information provided by another site, will be devised. These fundamental contributions will form the basis for end-user customizations of web sites to make them more readable, easier to use for frequent tasks, and amenable to operations like sorting and filtering done in the web browser. The capstone application of the proposed research will be a set of tools that support gathering web information to drive personal decisions, such as buying a car, finding a house, or choosing a job. To achieve these goals, the PI will develop new algorithms for inferring patterns and scripts that interact with and extract information from the Web, design and evaluate new ways to customize users' web experiences, and seek to gain a deeper understanding of how people acquire web information to make personal decisions.Broader Impacts: The outcomes of this project will equip end-users with more control over the accessibility and performance of their browsing experience, giving them more tools for making information-driven decisions about important issues, both personal and public, such as education, health care, public policy, safety, and the environment. The software to be developed by the PI will be released free of charge as open-source tools for public use, and as infrastructure for other researchers in end-user programming. The project will also expose a generation of MIT computer science graduates to HCI principles and techniques, so that as they move on to careers in software industry and academia, they produce more usable software; related course materials will be released for free, open, public use, as part of the MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative.