Andrew Head
Assistant Professor @ UPenn
Computer Science

Areas of interest: Human-computer interaction · Programming · Reading.

Welcome to my home page! I am Andrew Head, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. My group specializes in developing technology for interactive reading and reasoning. My current goals are to:

  • Help scientists get more out of their readings in less time
  • Make math notation everywhere inviting and understandable
  • Help programmers comprehend code using AI
  • Accelerate programmers in writing, maintaining, and understanding proofs of correctness about their programs

Our projects follow a systems-centric HCI approach. We do in-depth user studies to understand what people need from their tools. Then, we build working interactive systems, imbuing them with powerful new interaction design ideas. We publish our work at ACM CHI and UIST, and other venues focused on information presentation and programming support.

👥  Our group

I advise Ph.D. students Alyssa Hwang, Litao Yan, Hita Kambhamettu, Jeff Tao, Jessica Shi, and Xiaorui Liu. I co-lead our Penn Human-Computer Interaction (Penn HCI) alongside Danaé Metaxa. Our group works closely with Benjamin Pierce from PLClub and Chris Callison-Burch from PennNLP. I am also a faculty affiliate for Penn’s MindCORE center.

Prospective Ph.D. applicants: I will not be taking on incoming Ph.D. students in fall 2026.

Penn master's and bachelor's students: If you want to do research with our group, take Penn's class in human-computer interaction—CIS 4120/5120—and then apply to do research with our group here. You may also want to keep an eye out for special topics courses (7000-level) that I and Professor Metaxa teach, which frequently offer hands-on research experiences.

📰  Our latest news

October 2025: Litao Yan presented his paper on Trailblazer at UIST '25. The paper describes the design and evaluation of a tool for answering developer questions with agent-discovered program traces.

July 2025: Congratulations Harry Goldstein, Penn HCI alum, on receiving one of SIGPLAN's two oustanding dissertation awards. Congratulations as well on beginning your assistant professor position at UBuffalo.

March 2025: Two projects from our group will appear at CHI! The first is Jeffrey Tao's Freeform editor for embellishing math notation with explanations, accepted as a full paper. The second is Hita Kambhamettu's study of the effect of source-summary links on the reading of AI-generated text, which will appear as late-breaking work.

February 2025: Jessica Shi's QED in Context will appear in OOPSLA '25. The paper highlights strategies and obstacles proof assistant users face with their tools. Read the pre-print here.

September 2024: This semester, I am teaching a new research seminar on Interactive Reading. Our goal is to develop technology that deepens, accelerates, and enlivens reading. Check out the course teaser and syllabus.

August 2024: Harry Goldstein has had a paper accepted to UIST '24 on Tyche, a in-editor UI that helps programmers understand the comprehensiveness of their property-based tests. Read the paper here.

🧪  Publications

Our projects contribute novel interactions for programming (•), reading (•), and working with notation (•).

The Invisible Mentor: Inferring User Actions from Screen Recordings to Recommend Better Workflows [pdf]
Litao Yan, Andrew Head, Ken Milne, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani, Chris Parnin, and Emerson Murphy-Hill
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2026
• Answering Developer Questions with Annotated Agent-Discovered Program Traces [pdf]
Litao Yan, Jeffrey Tao, Lydia Chilton, and Andrew Head
ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), 2025
• QED in Context: An Observation Study of Proof Assistant Users [pdf]
Jessica Shi, Cassia Torczon, Harrison Goldstein, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Head
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA), 2025
• • FreeForm: Flexibly Augmenting Formulas with Synchronized Markup and Graphical Edits [pdf]
Jeffrey Tao, Litao Yan, Jessica Shi, Mia Ginsberg, and Andrew Head
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2025
• Tyche: Making Sense of Property-Based Testing Effectiveness [pdf]
Harrison Goldstein, Jeffrey Tao, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Head
ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), 2024
• The Semantic Reader Project: Augmenting scholarly documents through AI-powered interactive reading interfaces [pdf]
Kyle Lo, Joseph Chee Chang, Andrew Head, Jonathan Bragg, Amy X. Zhang, Cassidy Trier, 47 others, Marti A. Hearst, and Daniel S. Weld
Communications of the ACM (CACM), 2024
• Ivie: Lightweight Anchored Explanations of Just-Generated Code [pdf]
Litao Yan, Alyssa Hwang, Zhiyuan Wu, and Andrew Head
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024
• Explainable Notes: Examining How to Unlock Meaning in Medical Notes with Interactivity and Artificial Intelligence [pdf]
Hita Kambhamettu, Danaé Metaxa, Kevin Johnson, and Andrew Head
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2024
• Property-Based Testing in Practice [pdf]
Harrison Goldstein, Joseph W. Cutler, Daniel Dickstein, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Head
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, (ICSE), 2024
Best Paper Award
• • FFL: A Language and Live Runtime for Styling and Labeling Typeset Math Formulas [pdf]
Zhiyuan Wu, Jiening Li, Kevin Ma, Hita Kambhamettu, and Andrew Head
ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), 2023
• CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants [pdf]
Andrew Zhu, Lara Martin, Andrew Head, and Chris Callison-Burch
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, (AIIDE), 2023
• Rewriting the Script: Adapting Text Instructions for Voice Interaction [pdf]
Alyssa Hwang, Natasha Oza, Chris Callison-Burch, and Andrew Head
ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2023
• Scim: Intelligent Skimming Support for Scientific Papers [pdf]
Raymond Fok, Hita Kambhamettu, Luca Soldaini, Jonathan Bragg, Kyle Lo, Marti A. Hearst, Andrew Head, and Daniel S. Weld
ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), 2023
• Paper Plain: Making Medical Research Papers Approachable to Healthcare Consumers with Natural Language Processing [pdf]
Tal August, Lucy Lu Wang, Jonathan Bragg, Marti A. Hearst, Andrew Head, and Kyle Lo
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, (TOCHI), 2023
• CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context [pdf]
Joseph Chee Chang, Amy X. Zhang, Jonathan Bragg, Andrew Head, Kyle Lo, Doug Downey, and Daniel S. Weld
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023
Best Paper Award
• Colaroid: A Literate Programming Approach for Authoring Explorable Multi-Stage Tutorials [pdf]
April Yi Wang, Andrew Head, Ashley Zhang, Steve Oney, and Christopher Brooks
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2023
Nominated for Best Paper Award
• Bolt-on, Compact, and Rapid Program Slicing for Notebooks [pdf]
Shreya Shankar, Stephen Macke, Sarah Chasins, Andrew Head, and Aditya Parameswaran
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, (VLDB), 2023
• • Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices [pdf] [video]
Andrew Head, Amber Xie, and Marti A. Hearst
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2022
Best Paper Award
• From Who You Know to What You Read: Augmenting Scientific Recommendations with Implicit Social Networks [pdf] [video]
Hyeonsu B. Kang, Rafal Kocielnik, Andrew Head, Jiangjiang Yang, Matt Latzke, Aniket Kittur, Daniel S. Weld, Doug Downey, and Jonathan Bragg
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2022
• Fine-Grained Lineage for Safer Notebook Interactions [pdf]
Stephen Macke, Hongpu Gong, Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Andrew Head, Doris Xin, and Aditya Parameswaran
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, (VLDB), 2021
• • Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols [pdf] [code] [video]
Andrew Head, Kyle Lo, Dongyeop Kang, Raymond Fok, Sam Skjonsberg, Daniel S. Weld, and Marti A. Hearst
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2021
• Composing Flexibly-Organized Step-by-Step Tutorials from Linked Source Code, Snippets, and Outputs [pdf] [video]
Andrew Head, Jason Jiang, James Smith, Marti A. Hearst, and Björn Hartmann
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2020
Nominated for Best Paper Award
• Managing Messes in Computational Notebooks [pdf] [code] [video]
Andrew Head, Fred Hohman, Titus Barik, Steven M. Drucker, and Robert DeLine
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2019
Best Paper Award
Gamut: A Design Probe to Understand How Data Scientists Understand Machine Learning Models [pdf] [video]
Fred Hohman, Andrew Head, Rich Caruana, Robert DeLine, and Steven M. Drucker
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2019
• Interactive Extraction of Examples from Existing Code [pdf] [video]
Andrew Head, Elena L. Glassman, Björn Hartmann, and Marti A. Hearst
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018
Nominated for Best Paper Award
• WiFröst: Bridging the Information Gap for Debugging of Networked Embedded Systems [pdf] [video]
Will McGrath, Jeremy Warner, Mitchell Karchemsky, Andrew Head, Daniel Drew, and Björn Hartmann
ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium (UIST), 2018
• • When Not to Comment: Questions and Tradeoffs with API Documentation for C++ Projects [pdf]
Andrew Head, Caitlin Sadowski, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Andrea Knight
ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, (ICSE), 2018
• Writing Reusable Code Feedback at Scale with Mixed-Initiative Program Synthesis [pdf]
Andrew Head*, Elena Glassman*, Gustavo Soares*, Ryo Suzuki, Lucas Figueredo, Loris D'Antoni, and Björn Hartmann
ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, (L@S), 2017
'*' denotes equal contribution.
Can Human Development be Measured with Satellite Imagery? [pdf]
Andrew Head, Mélanie Manguin, Nhat Tran, and Joshua E. Blumenstock
International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, (ICTD), 2017
• TraceDiff: Debugging Unexpected Code Behavior Using Trace Divergences [pdf] [code]
Ryo Suzuki, Gustavo Soares, Andrew Head, Elena Glassman, Ruan Reis, Melina Mongiovi, Loris D'Antoni, and Björn Hartmann
IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2017
• • Tutorons: Generating Context-Relevant, On-Demand Explanations and Demonstrations of Online Code [pdf] [code]
Andrew Head, Codanda Appachu, Marti A. Hearst, and Björn Hartmann
IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2015
Nominated for Best Paper Award
Lamello: Passive Acoustic Sensing for Tangible Input Components [pdf] [video]
Valkyie Savage, Andrew Head, Wilmot Li, Gautham Mysore, Dan B Goldman, and Björn Hartmann
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2015
ToneWars: Connecting Language Learners and Native Speakers through Collaborative Mobile Games [pdf] [video]
Andrew Head, Yi Xu, and Jingtao Wang
International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, (ITS), 2014

🧑‍🏫  Teaching

Spring 2025: CIS 4120/5120: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (syllabus)

Fall 2024: CIS 7000: Interactive Reading (syllabus)

Spring 2024: CIS 4120/5120: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (syllabus)

Spring 2023: CIS 3990: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (syllabus)

Fall 2022: CIS 7000-001: Designing Programming Environments: Live and Literate Programming (syllabus)

Spring 2022: CIS 700-003: Human-Computer Interaction.

Summer 2019: CS160, User Interface Design and Development (co-taught with Sarah Sterman, @UC Berkeley)