On Clippy and building software assistants

I have been attending a reading group on visualization tools for the last few weeks. This is a unique multi-institution group that meets over web-conferencing at 4 PM EST / 1 PM PST on Fridays. It includes a diverse bunch of participants including non-academic researchers.

Every week we vote on and discuss a range of topics related to building tools for visualizing data.

This week, it was my turn to lead a discussion on the Lumiere paper. This is the research responsible for the now retired Clippy Office assistant. I also noticed a strong ISP presence in the references section as the paper focuses on Bayesian user modeling.

During the discussion, we talked about how we can offer help to use vis tools better. Here are my slides from it:


References

  1. Eric Horvitz, Jack Breese, David Heckerman, David Hovel, and Koos Rommelse. 1998. The lumière project: Bayesian user modeling for inferring the goals and needs of software users. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence (UAI’98), Gregory F. Cooper and Serafín Moral (Eds.). Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 256-265.
  2. Justin Matejka, Wei Li, Tovi Grossman, and George Fitzmaurice. 2009. CommunityCommands: command recommendations for software applications. In Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 193-202.

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