The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023 | Hacker News Reader

The future of programming: Research at CHI 2023

austinhenley.com

159 pointsazhenley35 comments

Oh man, wild to see an article about the biggest conference in my field pop up on HN.

It's surprising how quickly HCI people managed to pivot to AI stuff - the paper deadline for this conference was Sept. 15, 2022, which was about a month before ChatGPT was even released. So... expect to see even more AI at next year's conference in Honolulu!

V.interesting

Do any of these studies give a map of programming tasks that are enabled by LLM's vs tasks that don't benefit?

Note that CHI is not a programming language or software engineering conference, but a conference in human-computer interaction: it's the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

in Europe we call it HCI. In America, they put humans second, so they call it CHI.

Er what? It's the Conference for HcI = CHI

> in Europe we call it HCI

Well CHI is being held in Europe this year, so apparently you don't!

But more seriously, the field is "HCI" everywhere, including in America, and has been for at least thirty years. I have vague memories of hearing the story about why the initial ACM SIGCHI folks didn't go with HCI at the time but I can't recall. Anyway, it wasn't long after CHI was founded that basically everyone was using "HCI" on both sides of the Atlantic.

so why hasn't it changed, then?

Because it doesn't matter? NDSS has included topics beyond "network and distributed systems security" for ages too.

Also it isn't "computer/human interaction." It is "conference for human and computer interaction."

Inertia mostly. It's a question every grad student asks at some point.

If anyone is actually curious: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) started a Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI.org). Later, the Association for Information Systems (AIS) started a Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction (SIGHCI.org) which has remained about an order of magnitude smaller in impact and comes from a different originating field (Information Systems). My impression is that nearly all the papers in one journal would also make sense in the other, but CHI sometimes has a little more design-y or consumer product stuff while IS-HCI has some stuff that's more from the perspective of an IT department.

The CHI folks can't unilaterally rename to SIGHCI without stomping over the smaller org, which means merging two different organizations, journals, and conferences run by different professional associations. Such a thing is occasionally proposed (e.g. http://www.bridginghci.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/chi-20...) which would be nice but in reality I think that's unlikely to happen because the cost exceeds the benefits.

Ahem, at CHI, humans are at the center.

https://hci.cs.wisc.edu and http://hci-research.rit.edu and many others would beg to differ.

That's a point Ben Shneiderman insisted on making in 1983, when he named his "Human Computer Interaction Lab" at the University of Maryland HCIL instead of CHIL, where I worked with him from 1986-1990. Go Terps! ;)

Do you have any citations of European or other labs using that human-first convention before 1983?

University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Maryland_Human%E...

Ben Shneiderman:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman

Ben also coined the term "Direct Manipulation", and came up with the design of making links blue for the early HyperTIES hypermedia system we developed at HCIL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue (blog.mozilla.org):

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29897811

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29921532

>Ben Shneiderman recalled that "Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project".

Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

30 YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND’S HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB (HCIL). (2013) By Ben Shneiderman, Kent Norman, Catherine Plaisant, Benjamin Bederson, Allison Druin, Jennifer Golbeck:

http://interactionsdev.acm.org/archive/view/september-octobe...

>One attraction of the University of Maryland was its strong psychology department. My computing colleagues were intrigued by my early attempts to use empirical techniques to study programmers as they wrote, modified, or debugged programs. These crossover ideas caught the attention of Azriel Rosenfeld (1931–2004), a world leader in computer vision, who was forming an interdisciplinary Center for Automation Research (CfAR). He led the Computer Vision Lab and invited me to form a Human-Computer Interaction Lab when he launched CfAR in 1983. In a campus reorganization, HCIL became a unit in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and eventually became jointly managed with the iSchool.

>Rosenfeld's invitation advanced my efforts by at least five years, giving credibility to the "marriage of computer science and psychology," which I described in my 1980 book, Software Psychology. Gaining credibility was important, as this was still a time when many computer scientists were unsure about the value of psychological studies of programmers and database systems' users, and even the growing field of interactive computer systems. The term human-computer interaction (HCI) was still novel, but I insisted on putting the human first, as opposed to the ACM's choice of computer-human interaction to make a more pronounceable name, "CHI."

Ken Perlin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Perlin

Ken Perlin's Blog:

http://blog.kenperlin.com/?p=237

>Human first (May 29th, 2008)

>I spent the day today at the annual end-of-year symposium of the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland. All three of the Lab’s successive directors – Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin – were there, and they are all good friends of mine. Ben Shneiderman founded the lab in 1983. He is one of the fathers of the field of HCI research, and is a font of wisdom on many subjects. Ben Bederson, with whom I’ve been friends since he was in grad school, took over the lab directorship in 2000. Allison, who is married to Ben Bederson, became the lab’s director in 2006. I actually know Allison the longest of the three. I have had lots of time to talk with all three of them in the last twenty four hours, which has been great fun.

>The wonderful thing about the HCIL, as Allison pointed out today, is that it puts the “human” first. Much of computer science research seems to forget that there are such things as humans. Instead it seems to be a quest for a kind of abstract algorithmic purity, as though computer science were merely a branch of mathematics. The HCIL people have been way ahead of the curve in recognizing that the real power of computers comes when we find ways to interweave that power with the complementary power of the human mind. Computation is indeed enormously powerful, but computation that augments human thought is downright transformative. And to achieve that, you’ve got to understand human thought.

>This is rather tricky for many academics, because it requires bridging the large gap in scientific subcultures between computer science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. It’s very hard to get academic recognition when any given reviewer of your manuscript is not going to understand half of what you are saying. To me the people at HCIL are visionary because they recognized, a full quarter of a century ago – long before it was fashionable – the need to reconcile these two parts of the problem.

>And they are still at it. Only now the world is starting to catch up.

>Ben Shneiderman says on June 3, 2008 at 8:12 pm:

>Thanks Ken… for your kind words and thoughtful contribution to the 25th Anniversary events…. it’s great to see that our message was heard and received in a warm human way. Sincerely… Ben Shneiderman

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser: By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus: Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser (*) and Ben Shneiderman. Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742 (*) Computer Science Laboratory, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, Calif. 94303. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

I think it’s because CHI is pronounceable. My gf pronounces it “sig-χ”

This paper is quite good: Why Johnny Can't Prompt: How Non-AI Experts Try (and Fail) to Design LLM Prompts

I’m not fond of the provocative title because prompting is easy and only getting easier; the advice seems to be predicated on the use of relatively deficient LLMs. I don’t doubt there will still be operator skill involved, but I anticipate the state of the art for LLMs ability to adapt to “bad” prompts will outpace our ability to learn to prompt them effectively.

Disclaimer: I watched the video but didn’t read the paper.

I think there are a lot of instances where writing prompts can be hard just because it’s hard to express your needs in words sometimes. Bad prompts are often ambiguous and there is only so much even a perfect LLM can correct for. That is, until we have direct connections to our brains.

What makes you think it is clearer in your brain than it is in your words? My experience is that in my case it isn't.

Agree. Writing is a necessary part of clear though.

Who said we’d only give the LLMs read access?

I think you're right about prompts getting "easier" but I don't think it's a good thing. I expect it will evolve like google search. Where initially there are ways to increase specificity, or at least introduce enough randomness to get some different results, it will converge to something that ignores most of what you prompt and gives you what OpenAI wants you to see. That's really the only way adapting to "bad" prompts even could work

LLMs will definitely get better -- and people will adapt too. But natural language contains inherent ambiguity, and that's not going to change.

A large part of the paper talks about how the challenges of programming and developing ML systems don't go away just because you're using natural language and an LLM.

For example, users incorrectly extrapolating from a single failed/successful prompt to other contexts: that's not something that will be solved by better LLMs, really. It's solved by getting users to recognize when they do/don't have enough data to believe what they're seeing.

Disclaimer: I wrote the paper.

Thanks for the official TL/DR.

... And the laughs.

Paper is great, too. What's it like trying to write a paper while the field is shifting so rapidly? Is there anything you would have liked to include that had to be cut so you could get it out the door?

Oh, that's not a full TL;DR -- but sounds like you've read the paper. :)

Shifting field: yes, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is going to change and what isn't, at least in HCI (my field). LLM capabilities are changing by the...day? So anything that's very focused on LLM capabilities won't be relevant for long.

Humans don't change quite as fast!

Keep in mind this paper was first written in September 2022, reflecting work done prior to then...practically an eternity in which we've since seen ChatGPT take the world by storm, and now GPT-4. But I think the lessons there are still very relevant, and will be for quite some time.

I am surprised how quickly the HCI researchers jumped on chatgpt / prompt engineering.

they are chasing that research funding money

Sadly I think this is a significant part of it. It is so very hard to convince anyone in CS to fund unsexy projects. I think the majority of innovation on the unsexy things happens internally at the large tech companies.

Or maybe their chasing it because it's a highly relevant topic that might impact lots of people around the world, you know, a kind of human-computer interaction.

Just the response I would expect from an academic.

Just the response I would expect from an academic. Universities are charity-businesses with an educational interest.

Perhaps they could learn something about HCI from ChatGPT...?

Why? Natural language interaction with computers is like the holy grail of human-computer interaction, of course they jumped on it.

As someone in the field, trust me when I say there's going to be a big wave of HCI research that will pretty much just be "What can we glue ChatGPT to?"

Seems to be every technical field, both academic and industry…

Thanks for this. I'm interested in these subjects!

2023 conference program: https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2023/program

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