I am a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher. I am broadly interested in understanding people’s activities, their cognitive and social behaviours when performing those activities, and the problems they face doing so. I then use this knowledge to design software tools for various populations of people, to better support their activities.
In the past, I have explored these problems in programmers. That makes me a HCI researcher working on Human-Programming Interactions, and an SE researcher working on human aspects of programming and software engineering. Basically, I do research at the intersection SE and HCI, and publish in both communities. Recently, I am also entering Human-AI interaction, so that is that.
Some questions I’ve explored in my research are:
- How do programmers learn, how they debug, how they solve problems, how they version control, etc.?
- Why do developers do what they do, and where do they face challenges?
- How we can simplify programming to democratize it (e.g., for citizen data scientists, accountants)?
- How do people seek information, read stuff, build their knowledge, etc?
- What do people think about when they create information? (e.g., small commit or big commit? put it in a separate file or not? finish fast vs. make it more readable?)
- How do we build AI systems that are intelligible to the user (e.g., communicate what the magic is doing, what it has interpreted, where and why it fails, etc.)
The projects page has specifics of the projects involving these elements.
But more broadly, I am interested in any discipline of computer science that requires a deep understanding of people (e.g., design for inclusivity, making AI intelligible, or information design for low-literate users). That’s the fun part of being a HCI researcher, and I enjoy the play!
Sruti S Ragavan 