About the Editors

Allen Cypher, PhD, Research Staff Member, User Experience Research, IBM Almaden Research Center. Allen Cypher has been creating tools to bring the power of programming to nonprogrammers for 20 years. His Eager system from 1988 observed users’ actions and automatically wrote programs to automate repetitive activities. Eager was one of the first intelligent agents. In 1993, he edited Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. In the 1990s, he co-developed a visual programming language called Stagecast Creator that enabled children to create their own games and simulations and publish them on the Web. His current work with CoScripter is aimed at bringing end user programming to the Web. Dr. Cypher received an A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1975, a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University in 1980, and spent 4 years as a post-doctoral student in the Psychology department at the University of California, San Diego. He was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer for 9 years, and has been at the IBM Almaden Research Center for the past 7 years.

Mira Dontcheva, PhD, Research Scientist, Adobe Systems. Mira Dontcheva is a research scientist at Adobe Systems. Her research focuses on new interfaces and tools that help people make use of the vast amount of information found on the Web in the context of their daily activities. Before joining Adobe in 2008, Mira completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Washington with David Salesin, Michael Cohen, and Steven Drucker. Her thesis focused on novel interaction techniques for managing and repurposing Web content. Mira was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and completed her B.S.E. in Computer Engineering in 2000.

Tessa Lau, PhD, Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Research Center. Tessa has been doing research on end user programming since 1997, resulting in more than a dozen technical papers on the various aspects of EUP. Tessa’s research goal is to develop innovative interfaces for enhancing human productivity and creativity through the use of techniques drawn from artificial intelligence. Her research interests include intelligent user interfaces, machine learning, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, programming by demonstration, and email classification. She also contributed a chapter about her SMARTedit system to the second EUP book, Your Wish Is My Command. PhD, University of Washington’s Department of CS&E.

Jeffrey Nichols, PhD, Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Research Center. Jeffrey currently leads the Highlight project, which is building technology that allows users to easily create their own mobile versions of existing Web sites. His research interests are in the field of human-computer interaction, with a specific focus on automated design, mobile computing, end user programming, and ubiquitous computing. He received his PhD in December 2006 from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. His thesis described the first system to automatically generate interfaces that are consistent with a user’s previous experience and provided the first evidence from user studies that automatically generated interfaces can be more usable than human-designed interfaces in certain situations. He received a B.S. degree in computer engineering from the University of Washington in 2000.