Research interests

My inspiration is to ensure that computers are fun to use and make our lives better. In particular, I focus on new ways to interact with information in real-time. I sometimes call this direct manipulation 2.0.

For example, OmniGraphSketcher lets users draw and visually manipulate quantitative data and ideas. And TeraFractal lets users interactively create fractals by playing with a visual version of an iterated function system.

I am also interested in using this approach to take digital textbooks and reference works to their logical conclusion. Why stop at text? Why not create interactive applications for learning, exploring, and referencing each area of study? GraphSketcher starts to do this for economics. TeraFractal starts to do this for fractal math. They are the tip of the iceberg.

Résumé

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Publications

• *Best of CHI (top 1% of submissions): Robin Stewart and m.c. schraefel. 2009. Graph Sketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs. Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'09), Boston, MA.
• Robin Stewart, Gregory Scott, and Vladimir Zelevinsky. 2008. Idea Navigation: Structured Browsing for Unstructured Text. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'08), Florence, Italy.
• Robin Stewart, Andrea Danyluk, and Yang Liu. 2006. Off-Topic Detection in Conversational Telephone Speech. Proceedings of the Analyzing Conversations in Text and Speech (ACTS) Workshop at HLT-NAACL, New York City, NY.
• J. Hale, I. Shafran, L. Yung, B. Dorr, M. Harper, A. Krasnyanskaya, M. Lease, Y. Liu, B. Roark, M. Snover and R. Stewart. 2006. “PCFGs with Syntactic and Prosodic Indicators of Speech Repairs.” Proceedings of COLING and Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL), Sydney, Australia.
• B. Roark, Y. Liu, M. Harper, R. Stewart, M. Lease, M. Snover, I. Shafran, B. Dorr, J. Hale, A. Krasnyanskaya and L. Yung. 2006. “Reranking for Sentence Boundary Detection in Conversational Speech.” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Toulouse, France.
• B. Roark, M. Harper, E. Charniak, B. Dorr, M. Johnson, J. Kahn, Y. Liu, M. Ostendorf, J. Hale, A. Krasnyanskaya, M. Lease, I. Shafran, M. Snover, R. Stewart, L. Yung. 2006. “Sparseval: Evaluation Metrics for Parsing Speech.” Proceedings of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Genoa, Italy.

Theses

• Robin Stewart. May 2008. Interfaces for Creating Quantitative Conceptual Diagrams. Masters Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Robin Stewart. May 2006. Automatic Identification of Off-Topic Regions of Conversation. Senior Thesis, Williams College.

Talks

• OmniGraphSketcher and Direct Manipulation 2.0 (July 2009, dub, Seattle, WA)
• Graph Sketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs (April 2009, CHI'09, Boston, MA)
• Idea Navigation: Structured browsing for unstructured text (April 2008, CHI'08, Florence, Italy)
• Idea Navigation: Structured browsing for unstructured text (October 2007, HCIR'07, Cambridge, MA)
• Extendable, Semantics-Driven Parsing of Pidgin Language (May 2007, MIT)
• Off-Topic Detection in Conversational Telephone Speech (June 2006, ACTS Workshop at NAACL'06, New York City)
• Thesis Defense (May 2006, Williams College)
• A Small Talk (March 2006, Williams College)
• Thesis Research Proposal (August 2005, Johns Hopkins)

Projects

• OmniGraphSketcher: Fast, simple graph drawing and data plotting.
  • Graph Sketcher: Extending Illustration to Quantitative Graphs. Proceedings of CHI, 2009.
  • Interfaces for Creating Quantitative Conceptual Diagrams. Masters Thesis, 2008.
  • Usability of a Pen Interface for Sketching Graphs. Multimodal Interfaces Final Project Report, 2007.
  • Usability of an Interface for Sketching Graphs. Independent Study Final Report, 2005.
• Extendable, Semantics-Driven Parsing of Pidgin Language. Natural Language Processing Final Project Report, 2007
• TeraFractal: A visual interface for creating lifelike fractals.

Workshops

• Co-Chair, HCIR 2007: Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval
• Participant, Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing Summer Workshop 2005: Parsing and Spoken Structural Event Detection