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.
People
Sarah E. Chasins
Faculty
Rolando Garcia
Ph.D. Student
Slim "Sarah" Lim
Ph.D. Student
Justin Lubin
Ph.D. Student
Gabriel Matute
Ph.D. Student
Hellina Hailu Nigatu
Ph.D. Student
Parker Ziegler
Ph.D. Student
Dhanya Jayagopal
M.Sc. Student
Lisa Rennels
Energy & Resources Group Ph.D. Student, EECS M.Sc.
Rebecca Hicke
Undergraduate Student
Rajavi Mishra
Undergraduate Student
Projects
How Statically-Typed Functional Programmers Write Code
A grounded theory of how statically-typed functional programmers write code, covering domain modeling, type construction, focusing techniques, exploratory strategies, mental models, and expressions of intent. Ongoing work: collecting programmers’ fine-grained edit histories and developing analyses to parse and understand their behaviors over time.
Program transformation tools for easing the library upgrade process. Automatic upgrade for breaking changes.
A Cross-Domain Need-Finding Study with Users of Geospatial Data
A contextual inquiry exploring the challenges users face in gathering, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial data, drawing on participants from Earth and climate science, the social sciences, and data journalism.
FLOR
Fast Low-Overhead Recovery: 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.