Andrew Head

Assistant Professor

Department of Computer and Information Science

University of Pennsylvania

Research Interests

Human-Computer Interaction, Programming Systems, Literate Programming, Help Systems, Scholarly Documents, Reading Support, Data Science Tools.

Employment

2022–Present

University of Pennsylvania

Assistant Professor

2021

Allen Institute for AI

Semantic Scholar Research Team

Postdoctoral Scholar

Advisor: Daniel S. Weld
2020–2021

University of California, Berkeley

Postdoctoral Scholar

Advisor: Marti A. Hearst
2014–2020

University of California, Berkeley

Ph.D. Student

Advisors: Björn Hartmann and Marti A. Hearst
2019

Allen Institute for AI

Semantic Scholar Research Team

Research Intern

Advisor: Daniel S. Weld
2018

Microsoft Research

Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment Group

Research Intern

Advisors: Robert DeLine and Steven M. Drucker
2017

Google

Engineering Productive Research Team

Software Engineering Intern

Advisors: Caitlin Sadowski and Emerson Murphy-Hill
2013–2014

University of Pittsburgh

Research assistant

Advisor: Jingtao Wang
2010

Intel

Embedded Applications Group

Research Intern

Advisor: Patricia Wang

Selected awards

2023

Best of CHI Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 1% of submitted papers.
2023

Best of CHI Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 5% of submitted papers.
2022

Best of CHI Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 1% of submitted papers.
2020

Best of CHI Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 5% of submitted papers.
2019

Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award

Awarded to 10% of graduate student instructors in the department.
2019

Timothy B. Campbell Innovation Award

Presented to computer science or electrical engineering graduate student who demonstrates a spirit of innovation, collaboration, and creativity through her or his research and personal life. Read more here.
2019

Best of CHI Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 1% of submitted papers.
2018

Best of CHI Honorable Mention for Best Paper Award

Awarded to top 5% of submitted papers.
2016

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship

Awarded to about 200 of 3,000 scholarship applicants.
2016

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention

2015

Best Paper Nomination at VL/HCC

Awarded to the top 11% of accepted papers.
2014

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Honorable Mention

2014

UC Berkeley EECS Departmental First-Year Fellowship

2014

Emma Locke Memorial Award Nomination

2013

Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Award

2013

University Scholar, Swanson School of Engineering

2010

University Scholar, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences

2010

NSF International Research and Education in Engineering Grant

2008

Pitt Club of Greater Philadelphia Scholar

2008

University of Pittsburgh Honors College Full Tuition Scholarship

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

CHI '24

Ivie: Lightweight Anchored Explanations of Just-Generated Code

Litao Yan, Alyssa Hwang, Zhiyuan Wu, and Andrew Head

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2024

CHI '24

Explainable Notes: Examining How to Unlock Meaning in Medical Notes with Interactivity and Artificial Intelligence

Hita Kambhamettu, Danaë Metaxa, Kevin Johnson, and Andrew Head

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2024

ICSE '24

Property-Based Testing in Practice

Harrison Goldstein, Joseph W. Cutler, Daniel Dickstein, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Head

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, 2024

Best Paper Award

UIST '23

FFL: A Language and Live Runtime for Styling and Labeling Typeset Math Formulas

Zhiyuan Wu, Jiening Li, Kevin Ma, Hita Kambhamettu, and Andrew Head

ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium , 2023

AIIDE '23

CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Master's Assistants

Andrew Zhu, Lara Martin, Andrew Head, and Chris Callison-Burch

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2023

DIS '23

Rewriting the Script: Adapting Text Instructions for Voice Interaction

Alyssa Hwang, Natasha Oza, Chris Callison-Burch, and Andrew Head

ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems , 2023

IUI '23

Scim: Intelligent Skimming Support for Scientific Papers

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 , 2023

TOCHI '23

Paper Plain: Making Medical Research Papers Approachable to Healthcare Consumers with Natural Language Processing

Tal August, Lucy Lu Wang, Jonathan Bragg, Marti A. Hearst, Andrew Head, and Kyle Lo

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2023

CHI '23

CiteSee: Augmenting Citations in Scientific Papers with Persistent and Personalized Historical Context

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 , 2023

Best Paper Award

CHI '23

Colaroid: A Literate Programming Approach for Authoring Explorable Multi-Stage Tutorials

April Yi Wang, Andrew Head, Ashley Zhang, Steve Oney, and Christopher Brooks

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2023

Nominated for Best Paper Award

VLDB '23

Bolt-on, Compact, and Rapid Program Slicing for Notebooks

Shreya Shankar, Stephen Macke, Sarah Chasins, Andrew Head, and Aditya Parameswaran

International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2023

CHI '22

Math Augmentation: How Authors Enhance the Readability of Formulas using Novel Visual Design Practices

Andrew Head, Amber Xie, and Marti A. Hearst

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2022

Best Paper Award

CHI '22

From Who You Know to What You Read: Augmenting Scientific Recommendations with Implicit Social Networks

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 , 2022

VLDB '21

Fine-Grained Lineage for Safer Notebook Interactions

Stephen Macke, Hongpu Gong, Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Andrew Head, Doris Xin, and Aditya Parameswaran

International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, 2021

PDF
CHI '21

Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols

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 , 2021

CHI '20

Composing Flexibly-Organized Step-by-Step Tutorials from Linked Source Code, Snippets, and Outputs

Andrew Head, Jason Jiang, James Smith, Marti A. Hearst, and Björn Hartmann

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2020

Nominated for Best Paper Award

CHI '19

Managing Messes in Computational Notebooks

Andrew Head, Fred Hohman, Titus Barik, Steven M. Drucker, and Robert DeLine

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2019

Best Paper Award

CHI '19

Gamut: A Design Probe to Understand How Data Scientists Understand Machine Learning Models

Fred Hohman, Andrew Head, Rich Caruana, Robert DeLine, and Steven M. Drucker

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2019

CHI '18

Interactive Extraction of Examples from Existing Code

Andrew Head, Elena L. Glassman, Björn Hartmann, and Marti A. Hearst

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2018

Nominated for Best Paper Award

UIST '18

WiFröst: Bridging the Information Gap for Debugging of Networked Embedded Systems

Will McGrath, Jeremy Warner, Mitchell Karchemsky, Andrew Head, Daniel Drew, and Björn Hartmann

ACM User Interfaces Software and Technology Symposium , 2018

ICSE '18

When Not to Comment: Questions and Tradeoffs with API Documentation for C++ Projects

Andrew Head, Caitlin Sadowski, Emerson Murphy-Hill, and Andrea Knight

ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, 2018

L@S '17

Writing Reusable Code Feedback at Scale with Mixed-Initiative Program Synthesis

Andrew Head*, Elena Glassman*, Gustavo Soares*, Ryo Suzuki, Lucas Figueredo, Loris D'Antoni, and Björn Hartmann

ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2017

'*' denotes equal contribution.

The first three authors contributed equally to this work

ICTD '17

Can Human Development be Measured with Satellite Imagery?

Andrew Head, Mélanie Manguin, Nhat Tran, and Joshua E. Blumenstock

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, 2017

VL/HCC '17

TraceDiff: Debugging Unexpected Code Behavior Using Trace Divergences

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 , 2017

VL/HCC '15

Tutorons: Generating Context-Relevant, On-Demand Explanations and Demonstrations of Online Code

Andrew Head, Codanda Appachu, Marti A. Hearst, and Björn Hartmann

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing , 2015

Nominated for Best Paper Award

CHI '15

Lamello: Passive Acoustic Sensing for Tangible Input Components

Valkyie Savage, Andrew Head, Wilmot Li, Gautham Mysore, Dan B Goldman, and Björn Hartmann

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 2015

ITS '14

ToneWars: Connecting Language Learners and Native Speakers through Collaborative Mobile Games

Andrew Head, Yi Xu, and Jingtao Wang

International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2014

Lightly-reviewed workshop papers and posters

PLATEAU '23

Towards a Science of Interactive Proof Reading

Jessica Shi, Benjamin Pierce, and Andrew Head

SPLASH Workshop on the Intersection of HCI and PL , 2023

HATRA '22

Some Problems with Properties: A Study on Property-Based Testing in Industry

Harrison Goldstin, Joseph W. Cutler, Adam Stein, Benjamin C. Pierce, and Andrew Head

SPLASH Workshop on Human Aspects of Types and Reasoning Assistants, 2022

SDP '20

Document-Level Definition Detection in Scholarly Documents: Existing Models, Error Analyses, and Future Directions

Dongyeop Kang, Andrew Head, Risham Sidhu, Kyle Lo, Daniel S. Weld, and Marti A. Hearst

EMNLP First Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing, 2020

PDF
PLATEAU '20

Static Analysis for Safer Notebook Interactions

Stephen Macke, Hongpu Gong, Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Andrew Head, Doris Xin, and Aditya Parameswaran

SPLASH Workshop on the Intersection of HCI and PL , 2020

WAPI '18

Discovering API Usability Problems at Scale

Emerson Murphy-Hill, Caitlin Sadowski, Andrew Head, John Daughtry, Andrew Macvean, Ciera Jaspan, and Collin Winter

ICSE Workshop on API Usage and Evolution, 2018

PDF
CHI '17

Exploring the Design Space of Automatically Synthesized Hints for Introductory Programming Assignments

Ryo Suzuki, Gustavo Soares, Elena Glassman, Andrew Head, Loris D'Antoni, and Björn Hartmann

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Late-Breaking Work, 2017

PDF
FSE '16

Social Health Cues Developers Use when Choosing Open Source Packages

Andrew Head

ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Student Research Competition, 2016

PDF

Research mentoring

Doctoral mentoring

2022–Present
Litao Yan (Penn)
2022–Present
Rajeswari Hita Kambhamettu (Penn)
2021–Present
Alyssa Hwang (Penn, with Chris Callison-Burch)
2022–Present
Harrison Goldstein (Penn, advised by Benjamin C. Pierce)
2020–Present
Raymond Fok (UW, advised by Daniel S. Weld and James Fogarty)
2021–2022
Tal August (UW, advised by Katharina Reinecke and Noah Smith)
2017–2021
Nathaniel Weinman (UC Berkeley, advised by Marti A. Hearst and Armando Fox)

Master’s mentoring

2023–Present

Jiening Li

2022–Present

Zhiyuan Wu

2020–2021

Vivek Aithal

2020

Daniel McAndrew

2018–2019

Kunal Chadhary (now Chief Operating Officer, Co-founder at Banner)

Thesis: Jupyter’s Archive: Searchable Output Histories for Computational Notebooks

Capstone projects

2018

Generating Explanations For Mathematical Notations

Master's of Engineering, Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Students: Yujia Wang, Lysia Li, Tianhao Zhang

2018

Improving the Software Package Search Experience for Developers

Master's of Engineering, Computer Science, UC Berkeley

Students: Avery Nisbet, Joshua Choo, Mengshi Feng, Vivian Liu, Yidan Zhang

Bachelor’s mentoring

2022
Kevin Ma
2021
Amber Xie (now Fifth-year Master's student at UC Berkeley)
2020–2021
Risham Sidhu (now Ph.D. student at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
2019–2021
Jason Jiang
2019–2021
Jocelyn Sun (now Master's student at University of Maryland, College Park)
2019–2020
Zachary Kirby (now Frontend Developer at Productiv)
2019–2020
Jusheen Kim
2018–2019
Benjamin Barantschik (now at Google)
2018–2019
Luming Chen (now at Microsoft)
2018–2019
Nidhi Kakulawaram (now Fifth-year Master's student at UC Berkeley)
2018–2019
RJ Pimentel (now at Apple)
2018
Nathan Khuu (now Master's student at UC Berkeley)
2015–2016
Austin Le (now at Adobe)
2014–2015
Matthew Waliman (now Research scientist at UC Berkeley)
2013
Bill Wang (now at Accenture)

High school mentoring

2022
Max Berger

Teaching

2023

Instructor

CIS3990: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction

University of Pennsylvania

2022

Instructor

CIS7000-001: Designing Programming Environments: Live and Literate Programming

University of Pennsylvania

2022

Instructor

CIS700-003: Human-Computer Interaction

University of Pennsylvania

2019

Lecturer

CS160: User Interface Design and Development

UC Berkeley

With Sarah Sterman (co-lecturer).

Syllabus

2017

Graduate Student Instructor

CS 194-131: Designing Technology to Counter Violent Extremism

UC Berkeley

2015

Head Graduate Student Instructor

CS160: User Interface Design and Development

UC Berkeley

Syllabus

2009–2010

Teaching assistant

PHYS 0475: Honors Physics

University of Pittsburgh

Invited talks

2023

Designing the Interactive Paper

MIT HCI Seminar

Host: Arvind Satyanarayan
2023

Designing the Interactive Paper

Stanford HCI Seminar

Host: Michael Bernstein

Watch it here

2022

Designing the Interactive Paper

KAIST

Host: Juho Kim
2022

Designing the Interactive Paper

COLING Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing

2022

Designing the Interactive Paper

UW Seminar on The Future of Scientific Communication

Host: Jeff Heer
2022

Power Tools for Reading and Authoring Complex Documents

BAYCHI San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI

Host: Ted Selker

Watch it here

2022

Interactive Program Distillation

Penn course CIS 810, Writing and Speaking with Style

Host: Benjamin Pierce
2021

Interactive Program Distillation

University of Pennsylvania PLClub

Host: Steve Zdancewic
2021

Input Devices and Proxemics: Designing Beyond the Screen

UC Berkeley Course CS 160, User Interface Design and Implementation

Host: Nate Weinman and Janaki Vivrekar
2021

Interactive Authoring and Reading with IDEs for Ideas

Allen Institute for AI

Host: Dan Weld
2021

Notebooks, Narrative, and 'Nteractions

Microsoft Research

Host: Steven M. Drucker
2021

Interactive Authoring and Reading with IDEs for Ideas

University of Michigan Computer Science and Engineering Division

Host: Cyrus Omar
2021

Interactive Authoring and Reading with IDEs for Ideas

Adobe Research Document Intelligence group

Host: Tong Sun
2021

Interactive Authoring and Reading with IDEs for Ideas

University of Pittsburgh Department of Informatics and Networked Systems

Host: Konstantinos Pelechrinis
2021

Interactive Authoring and Reading with IDEs for Ideas

Cornell University Department of Information Science

Host: François Guimbretière
2021

IDEs for Ideas

University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science

Host: Dan Roth
2020

Practical Prototyping for Programming Tools

Guest Lecture

UC Berkeley course CS 294-184, Building User-Centered Programming Tools

Host: Sarah Chasins
2020

Tools for Transforming Creative Coding Messes into Helpful Example Programs

Invited Talk

Arizona State University Digital Culture Speaker Series

Host: Suren Jayasuriya

Watch it here

2019

Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction

Guest Lecture

UC Berkeley course CS 10, The Beauty and Joy of Computing

2019

Synopticon: Augmenting the Reading Experience for Scientific Papers from arXiv

End-of-Internship Talk

Allen Institute for AI

2019

Notebooks, Narratives, and 'Nteractions

Invited Talk

Apple

Host: Dominik Moritz
2019

Researching how developers use API docs

Invited Podcast Interview

Write the Docs Podcast

Watch it here

2018

Interactive Extraction of Examples from Existing Code

Invited Keynote

PLATEAU workshop on the intersection of HCI and PL

Host: Sarah Chasins
2018

Interactive Tools for Creating and Explaining Code Examples

Invited Talk

Brown Computer Science

Host: Shriram Krishnamurthi
2018

Bionic Tools for Documenting Code

Invited Talk

Mozilla Emerging Technologies Speaker series

Host: Jofish Kaye

Watch it here

2018

Bionic Tools for Documenting Code

Invited Talk

Microsoft Program Synthesis using Examples (PROSE) group

Host: Gustavo Soares
2017

To Doc or Not: Questions and Tradeoffs with API Documentation for C++ Projects

End-of-Internship Talk

Google

2017

Creating Context-Relevant, In-Situ Help for Programming Learners

Invited Talk

Stanford HCI group lunch

Host: Pablo Paredes
2017

Writing Reusable Code Feedback at Scale with Mixed-Initiative Program Synthesis

Invited Talk

Harvard Data to Actionable Knowledge (DtAK) Lab

With Elena L. Glassman.

Host: Finale Doshi-Velez
2015

3D Printing Interactive Devices

Invited Lightning Talk

Berekley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS)

Host: Maneesh Agrawala

Watch it here

Service

Academic service

2023

Organizing Committee

ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium

2022, 2023

Program Committee

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing

2021, 2022

Program Committee

ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium

2022

Program Committee

NAACL Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing

2021

Program Committee

SPLASH Workshop on Human Aspects of Types and Reasoning Assistants

2021

Poster and Showpieces Co-Chair

IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing

2019

Student Volunteer at Program Committee meeting

ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium

2016

Student Volunteer

ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

2016

Student Volunteer

ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Reviewer

2018, 2020-2023
ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium
2016, 2020-2023
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2022
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
2022-2023
IEEE Visual Languages and Human-Centered Computing Symposium
2021, 2023
SPLASH Workshop on Bringing Together Programming Languages and Human-Computer Interaction (PLATEAU)
2023
IEEE Visualization Conference
2023
ACM Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
2021
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
2020
ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference
2020
ACM Transactions on Computing Education
2018, 2020
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2016
Showpieces for the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
2016
IEEE Software

Departmental service

2022, 2023

Organizer for admitted Ph.D. student open house

University of Pennyslvania Department of Computer and Information Science

2022

Invited speaker on teaching and mentoring

Penn Center for Teaching and Learning graduate student workshops

2015–2019

Organizer and Host

Berkeley Institute of Design Seminar

2017

Master's of Engineering Admissions Committee

UC Berkeley Computer Science Division

2016

Organizer

Berkeley Programming UX Reading Group

2016, 2015

Area Activity Coordinator for Ph.D. Admit Visit Days

UC Berkeley Human-computer interaction group

2015

Makerspace Lab Assistant

CITRIS Invention Lab

Outreach

2020–2021

Peer advisor

Graduate Pathways to STEM, University of California

2018–2020

CS Area Coordinator

EECS Peers, UC Berkeley

2020

Mentor

Snap the Gap!, King Middle School

2014

Lab activity mentor

Students for Environmental Education Development, UC Berkeley