Research interests

My inspiration is to ensure that computers make our lives better. I aim to make computers more fun to use, particularly in situations when you are getting work done. To do this, it is necessary to carefully understand how people work. I build on the principles of direct manipulation to convert abstract computer-centric data structures into manipulable, user-centric visual objects.

For example, Graph Sketcher lets users visually "draw" and manipulate plotted mathematical objects. And Terafractal lets users create fractals via a visual representation of an iterated function system.

Résumé

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Publications

• 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), 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.
• 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.
• 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

• 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

• Graph Sketcher: Make beautiful 2D graphs... simply by sketching them.
  • 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