Research

Live coding is a performance practice where one or more performers continuously run and modify code to create music or visuals. In this project, we seek to better understand how live coding musicians keep track of the evolving state of their programs and how that differs in performance vs. practice. To that end, we are also developing an IDE extension which helps live coders keep track of their program versions as they explore new sounds and new code.

Octave (Observable Connections between Tables, Algorithms, and Visualization in an EUP) is an end-user programming environment that allows for the visualization and analysis of spatiotemporal trajectory data. It's designed to help construction students understand GPS data gathered from the field. Octave presents data both as a table and as a visualization and provides a small and simple set of simple computational primitives. The views of the data are tightly connected to provide a responsive and intuitive environment. For example, hovering over a table row will highlight the corresponding data point(s) in the visualization.

Existing Trigger-Action Programming systems such as IFTTT allow users to define simple if-then programs consisting of a "Trigger" and "Action". For example, a program could be "If it starts to rain (Trigger), then change my smart light bulb color to blue (Action)". In this project, we built a system called iThem which piggy-backs off of IFTTT: users create Triggers and Actions using IFTTT's convenient interface, but then connect them using short snippets of JavaScript. This affords users the full power of a textual programming language, but still allows them to outsource tricky API integrations to a simple UI.