PLAITLab
Programming Languages for Approachable and Inclusive Tools
@ UC Berkeley EECS
Research Themes
PL for Social Good
We invent usable programming tools to help teams working for social good—social scientists, journalists, lawyers, domain experts focused on marginalized groups. (Working for social good and struggling to write code or process data? Get in touch!)
PL+HCI
We combine techniques from Programming Languages and Human-Computer Interaction to make programming languages and programming tools that work better for coders and non-coders alike.
News
New paper at FAccT '23
6/15/2023
Hellina published the first paper of her Ph.D. journey at FAccT 2023! Check out Co-Designing for Transparency: Lessons from Building a Document Organization Tool in the Criminal Justice Domain.
Two papers at CHI '23 ⛵
4/23/2023
Parker and Eric each published the first papers in their Ph.D. journies! Check out A Need-Finding Study with Users of Geospatial Data and Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose.
PLAIT goes to Napa
4/17/2023
Justin, Eric, and Parker all presented their research at this spring's EPIC Data Lab retreat in Napa, CA.
PLATEAU 2023
2/14/2023
Jeremy, Jacob, Kevin, and Justin headed to PLATEAU 2023 to present their workshop paper Searching for Incidental Specifications!
People
Sarah E. Chasins
Faculty
Rolando Garcia
Ph.D. Candidate
Slim Lim
Ph.D. Student
Justin Lubin
Ph.D. Candidate
Gabriel Matute
Ph.D. Student
Hellina Hailu Nigatu
Ph.D. Student
Eric Rawn
Ph.D. Student
Parker Ziegler
Ph.D. Student
David Minh-Duy Cao
Ph.D. Student
Dhanya Jayagopal
M.Sc. Student
Jacob Yim
M.Sc. Student
Sora Kanosue
M.Sc. Student
Lisa Rennels
Energy & Resources Group Ph.D. Student, EECS M.Sc.
Arda Demirci
Undergraduate Student
Rebecca Hicke
Undergraduate Student
Selina Kim
Undergraduate Student
Rajavi Mishra
Undergraduate Student
Hannah Perlstein
Undergraduate Student
Liliana Rojas
Undergraduate Student Assistant
Projects
A Need-Finding Study with Users of Geospatial Data
A contextual inquiry study exploring the challenges users face in finding, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial data, drawing on participants from Earth and climate science, the social sciences, and data journalism.
DOT: Building a Document Organization tool for the Criminal Justice Domain
A cross-discipline co-design project to build a Document Organization Tool for public defenders and investigative journalists working on police use-of-force and misconduct data disclosures.
Entity Extraction From Police Records
Program synthesis tool to match documents based on locational similarities.
cobbler: The Component-Based Refactoring Synthesizer
A program synthesizer that synthesizes compositions of library components equivalent to user-provided code using a novel and fast program equivalence check. Refactors thousands of real-world programs!
Syntactic Code Search with Sequence-to-Tree Matching
A new lightweight code search query language based on tokenizers and tree automatas to support accurate and incremental syntactic search queries for interactive settings.
Exploring the Learnability of Program Synthesizers by Novice Programmers
A thematic analysis on the first-use usability of program synthesizers by novice programmers, including findings on specification modalities, interpreting synthesis outputs, and user behaviors.
Change in Software Ecosystems
An analysis of social challenges to propagate breaking changes in existing software ecosystems to discover opportunities for new techniques to automate upgrades.
Simplifying Refinement Types
A deterministic syntax-directed algorithm to synthesize simple types that guarantee contraints from a refinement type, including common background theories and an OCaml implementation.
FLOR: Fast Low-Overhead Recovery
A hindsight logging toolkit for model training.
Helena
Programming-by-demonstration tool for automating repetitive interactions with webpages. Designed for non-programmers from the social sciences.
How Statically-Typed Functional Programmers Write Code
A grounded theory (and experimental validation) of how statically-typed functional programmers write code, covering domain modeling, type construction, focusing techniques, exploratory strategies, mental models, and expressions of intent.
Understanding Version Control as Material Interaction with Quickpose
A version control tool for creative programmers. We used this tool to study how people use different versions of their programs in their process—navigating between, annotating and arranging, and backtracking to previous versions of their programs.