Computers have become part of our daily lives. People use computers for work, entertainment, social activities and managing personal information. The wide variety of tasks make the existing computer programs hard to satisfy every user's need.
My research goal is to enable everyday computer users to create and customize their computer programs. I am interested in applying HCI techniques to understand the challenges programmers encounter and design tools to help them overcome the barriers. I am excited about developing new interaction techniques to create a fun and friendly programming experience.
Kerry Shih-Ping Chang
Newell-Simon Hall 2621
HCI Institute
Carnegie Mellon Univeristy
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
email: kerrychang [at] cs.cmu.edu
skype: kerryspchang
current projects
Personal Data Management on Mobile Devices
The popularity of today's smart phones makes them good platforms for personal information management. However, most mobile PIM applications lack customizability and cannot meet the various needs of their users. The project investigates a user interface that supports easy creation of customized forms to store personal data and using contextual information and auto completion to minimize text input.
WebCrystalWebCrystal is a web development tool that helps users understand how a web page is constructed. It allows the user to quickly access HTML and CSS information by selecting questions regarding how a selected element is designed, and provides answers using a textual description and a customized code snippet that can be copied-and-pasted to recreate the desired properties. WebCrystal also supports combining the styles and structures from multiple elements into the generated code, and provides visualizations on the web page itself to explain layout relationships. Published at CHI 2012.
view project >>
recent projects
Helping End-user Programmers Solve Performance Problems
The lack of formal software engineering training often causes end-user programmers to produce slow-running programs. I conducted interviews with application engineers as well as surveyed online discussion forums to identify common code patterns that made the program ran slow. Based on the results, I designed a user interface that allowed users to ask questions to a program output about why certain elements in the output was slow, and suggested code patterns that most likely caused the slow behaviors. This was my summer internship project at National Instruments in 2010.
Crowdsourced Learning on the Job
Crowdsourcing provides a means to produce educational and economic resources for developing regions. Translating the vast textual resources of the Internet would allow those in developing regions greater access to educational resources. By examining workers translating both individually and in groups, we provide a use case for an editing interface that supports collaborative translation and we show that crowdsourcing can gainfully employ workers in developing regions while at the same time allowing workers to learn language skills. This is a course project in HCI Process and Theory In CMU, Fall 2010. Teamwork with Ruogu Kang, Peter Kinnaird and Jeff Rzeszotarski.
past projects
Playful Bottle
This study of mobile persuasion system explores the use of a mobile phone, when attached to an everyday object used by an everyday behavior, becomes a tool to sense and influence that behavior. Playful Bottle is a mobile persuasive system that makes use of a mobile phone attached to an everyday drinking mug and motivates office workers to drink healthy quantities of water. A camera and accelerometer sensors in the phone are used to detect the amount and regularity of water consumed by the user. Two hydration games are developed: a single-user TreeGame with automated computer reminders and a multi-user ForestGame with computer-mediated social reminders from members of the group playing the game. Published at UBICOMP 2009.
LampetHigh myopia is often a result of bad posture. In this project, we design a persuasion system, Lampet, to help users maintain proper reading/writing distance. By using two webcams placed on a lamp with stereo triangulation algorithm, we are able to detect the distance between user's eyes and the pen s/he holds. Mobile phone is used as a platform for visual feedback and interaction interface. A virtual chracter is shown on the screen to reflect the current sitting posture of the user, and a vibration alarm is used as a reminder for bad posture. This is a course project in Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing in NTU, Spring 2009. Teamwork with Tony Liu and Clifton Lin.
For more undergraduate projects, go to my old project page >>
:: Education ::
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (Augest 2010 ~ present)
Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan (September 2005 ~ June 2009)
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science and Information Engineering
:: publication ::
Kerry S. Chang and Brad A. Myers, "WebCrystal: Understanding and Reusing Examples in Web Design", Proceedings ACM CHI'2012. Austin, TX, May 5-10, 2012. To appear. [pdf] [video]
Meng-Chieh Chiu, Shih-Ping Chang, Yu-Chen Chang, Hao-hua Chu, Cheryl Chia-Hui Chen, Fei-Hsiu Hsiao, Ju-Chun Ko, "Playful Bottle: a Mobile Social Persuasion System to Motivate Healthy Water Intake", Proceedings ACM UBICOMP'2009. Orlando, FL, Sep.30 - Oct.3, 2009. pp. 185-194. [pdf] [acm] [video]
:: research experience ::
Graduate Research, Carnegie Mellon University (September 2010 ~ present)
Programming Environment, End-User Programming and User Interface Design.
Advisor: Prof. Brad A. Myers
Applying HCI technique and methods to design authoring tools for programmers and designers.
Research Intern, National Instruments (May 2011 ~ July 2011)
User Interface Design
Designed a tool to help end-user programmers solve performance issues in their programs.
Undergraduate Research, National Taiwan University (July 2008 ~ July 2010)
Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction Design.
Advisor: Prof. Hao-Hua Chu
Created mobile systems to provide digital service in everyday activities, and designed persuasion interface using interaction game and visualized data.
Full CV in PDF >>
I am a second-year PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor is Prof. Brad Myers. 
