Recent News

News Archives

February 27, 2008
EUSES spreadsheet error research spins off into a commercial product.

• RedRover Software Inc, a start-up company originally incubated by EUSES members Margaret Burnett, Martin Erwig and Gregg Rothermel, provides productivity tools for spreadsheet quality control-- including auditing and error detection.
• Details about the product launch can be found here.

February 20, 2008
EUSES member Laura Beckwith’s research into end-user debugging by male and female end-user programmers makes the news. The Boston Globe [local copy]

February 15, 2008
EUSES member Mary Beth Rosson has been inducted into the CHI Academy.
The CHI Academy is an honor bestowed upon a few individuals each year who have made extensive contributions to the study of HCI and who have led the shaping of the field. This year six new Academy members were selected. The induction ceremony will be at CHI 2008.

September 26, 2007
EUSES researchers win Best Paper Award and Best Short Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing.

• Mary Beth Rosson, Hansa Sinha, Mithu Bhattacharya, and Dejin Zhao, Design planning in end-user web development, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Couer d’Alene, Idaho, Sept. 23-27, 2007, pp. 189-196. (Best Paper) [Coming soon to the IEEE Digital Library]
• Susan Wiedenbeck, Xiaoning Sun, and Thippaya Chitakovid, Antecedents to End Users’ Success in Learning to Program in an Introductory Programming Course, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Couer d’Alene, Idaho, Sept. 23-27, 2007, pp. 69-72. (Best Short Paper) [Coming soon to the IEEE Digital Library]

September 24, 2007
An AP story was recently released on Laura Beckwith's, Margaret Burnett's, and Susan Wiedenbeck's Gender HCI work, and has been picked up by numerous news feeds.

• ACM Tech News [local copy]
• Chicago Tribune [local copy]
• CNN Money [local copy]
• Forbes [local copy]
• MSNBC [local copy]
• Time [local copy]
• The Washington Post [local copy]
• USA Today [local copy]

July 10, 2007
Margaret Burnett, Gregor Engels, Brad Myers, and Gregg Rothermel organized a Dagstuhl in February on end-user software engineering. The proceedings of the event are now available at the Dagstuhl site or here as a as a single pdf.

June 14, 2007, updated on.
The GoalDebug system, by EUSES Researchers Robin Abraham and Martin Erwig, is in the news. GoalDebug is a system for automatically identifying errors in formulas of a spreadsheet and suggesting appropriate changes. july 12th<--> Lupa (Czech) [local copy], july 7th<--> Digital Journal [local copy], july 6th<--> OSP (Russian) [local copy], july 4th<--> Science Daily [local copy], june 24th<--> Nerve (Indian) [local copy], june 12th<--> Sourcing Innovation [local copy], june 6th<--> Linux World [local copy], Computerworld [local copy], Bulletins-Electroniques (French) [local copy], ITR Manager (French) [local copy], june 4th<--> Teknofil (Norwegian) [local copy], L'Informaticien (French) [local copy], may 31st<--> Bizzen (Danish) [local copy], may 29th<--> ZDNet [local copy], Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends [local copy], CIO CIO (2) [local copy], may 26th<--> Digital Publico (Portuguese) [local copy], may 25th<--> The Engineer Online [local copy], Security Viewpoints [local copy], may 24th<--> PhysOrg [local copy], ACM TechNews, EurekAlert [local copy], IT Compliance Institute [local copy]

April 17, 2007
The final report from WEUSE II (From End-User Programming to End-User Software Engineering: a CHI06 Workshop) is now available. Details of the workshop are available too here.

February 11, 2007
The EUSES Macro Scenario Corpus is wikified. The corpus is a set of illustrative scenarios where end-user programmers would benefit from creating web macros. These scenarios highlight important requirements for web macro tools such as Koala and Robofox. Several members in the EUSES consortium have collaborated to produce version 1.0 of this scenario corpus, and we eagerly await scenario suggestions from other members of our community. Anybody who wants to contribute scenarios should contact Chris Scaffidi (cscaffid@gmail.com) for a username/password.

December 1, 2006
The entire set of problems Maggie Niess has been using for teaching high school students about spreadsheets is now available online. The problems can be found here: Spreadsheet Problems for Teachers.

November 11, 2006
Based on observations of browser users, EUSES researchers have compiled a corpus of scenarios describing tasks that end users would benefit from automating using web macros. Our analysis of these scenarios yields specific requirements that web macro tools must support if those tools are to be applicable to real-life situations. [CMU] [local copy]

September 13, 2006
Mary Beth Rosson, "End Users Who Meet Their Own Requirements", keynote for the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (Minneapolis, Minnesota). [Local Copy]

October 27, 2006
Gregg Rothermel, "Helping End-User Programmers "Engineer" Dependable Software", keynote for the Sixth International Conference on Quality Software (Beijin, China).

July 27, 2006
The EUSES Consortium welcomes its newest researcher Allen Cypher from the IBM Alameda Research Campus.
Allen Cypher's Home Page
IBM Research Home page

May 5, 2006
WEUSE II Workshop outcomes, notes, and other files are available at the WEUSE II home page.

April 27, 2006
Slides from Brad Myers's Invited Research Overview at CHI'06 on "End-User Programming". The research looks into the proliferation of people who program for work.
Color PDF
Black and White PDF
Original paper from which slides are based

October 19, 2005
Mary Beth Rosson, "The End of Users", Onward! keynote presentation at OOPSLA 2005 (San Diego, CA). [Local Copy]

August 03, 2005
"Software Is Too Buggy and Unreliable" in PC Magazine. [Local Copy]

May 15, 2005
"Making It On Their Own" and "Eliminating User Error" in CIO Magazine. [Local Copy]

May 5, 2005
Helping Exterminate Bugs in Spreadsheets, Web Applications on the Newswise site.

April/May, 2005
EUSES researchers win "Distinguished Paper Award" at both ICSE'05 and CHI'05 for their results about problems people face in the course of programming.
CHI paper: Fogarty, Ko, Aung, et. al [ACM] [Local Copy]
ICSE paper: Ko, Aung, Myers, [ACM] [Local Copy]

Apr 26, 2005
"Exterminating Bugs" radio spot transcript, from "Imagine That", with Margaret Burnett. [Local Copy]

Jul 26, 27, and Aug 6, 2004
"Researchers aim to make debugging simpler" at CNN.com [Local Copy], SMH.com [Local Copy], Detroit News [Local Copy], Salon.com [Local Copy]

Aug 3, 2004
"Debugging for computer users" in OSU Research News [Local Copy]

Jul 27, 2004
"Debugging for dummies" in CBS News [Local Copy], The Economic Times [Local Copy]

Jul 26, 2004
"Researchers Aim for Plain-English Debugging" in ACM News Service

Jun 24, 2004
"The dangers of end user programming" in IEEE Software [Local Copy]

Jun 9, 2004
"New Program Exterminates End-User Bugs" in NewsFactor CIO Today [Local Copy]

May 14, 2004
"Debugging for the Masses" in PC Magazine [Local Copy]

May 14, 2004
"Researchers help everyday computer users work smart" in Oregon State University News & Communication Services [Local Copy]

May 11, 2004
"Rosson Will Study Non-Programmers As Part of Six-University NSF Grant" in PennState IST [Local Copy]

May 7, 2004
"Helping Exterminate Bugs in Spreadsheets, Web Applications" in ACM TechNews [Local Copy], National Science Foundation Press Release [Local Copy], Innovations Report [Local Copy], Eurekalert [Local Copy], and NewsWise [Local Copy]

May 6, 2004
National Journal's Technology Daily article [Local Copy]

Feb, 2004
"EUSES Consortium Researchers Help Everyday Computer Users Work Smart" in The SAO Newsletter [Local Copy]

Dec 16, 2003
"Working Smarter With Computers" in KVAL-TV13 [Local Copy]

Recent and Upcoming Events

Past Events

April 5-10, 2008, Florence, Italy

• CHI 2008: There are a number of papers and activities that are relevant to end-user programming and end-user software engineering.
• Here are the notes from the SIG on end-user sofware engineering that was held as part of CHI 2008.

Sept. 22-26, 2007. Coeur d'Alene, Idaho
IEEE VL/HCC 2007 is one of the primary outlets for end-user programming and end-user software engineering research. VL/HCC will be in beautiful Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. As in the past few years, funding for some U.S. graduate students to attend is expected.

May 20-26, 2007. Minneapolis, MN
ICSE 2007 is in May and there are paper presentations of interest for folks interested in end-user software engineering and in human issues of programming. The advanced program can be found at the ICSE homepage.

April 28th - May 3rd, San Jose, CA
ACM's CHI'2007 has passed and a number of the results are available>

• A full list of the papers can be found on the CHI'2007 program.
• Industrial instances of End-User Software Engineering (from participants at CHI'07 SIG on End-User Software Engineering): a pdf of the slides is available.
• Summary of Dagstuhl outcomes (as presented at CHI'07 SIG on End-User Software Engineering): a pdf of the slides is available.

Sept. 4-8, 2006, Brighton, UK
IEEE VL/HCC is a conference that strongly emphasizes end-user software development and visual software development. Also related to this area are the two conferences co-located with it, ACM SoftVis and PPIG.

January-August, 2006
Attention education researchers and professionals: 2005-2006 education conference presentations are now available for download here.

April 22-27, 2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
CHI 2006: There are a number of papers and activities that are relevant to end-user programming and end-user software engineering.

• Information is now available on the Second Workshop on End-User Software Engineering (WEUSE II), to be held in conjunction with CHI 2006. Details available here.
• A number of papers on end-user software engineering appeared at CHI'06. (You can find the ones involving EUSES Consortium authors by going to our papers page and searching on "CHI".)
• Brad Myers' talk on "Invited Research Overview: End-User Programming" on April 26. Details available here.

July 5-28, 2005, Oregon State University, OR, USA
Summer Session graduate coursework at OSU, SED589, "Guiding Students in Learning Mathematics with Spreadsheets" and follow-up course SED506, "Dynamic Spreadsheets in Mathematics Curriculum and Instruction". See .doc for more details.

June 28, 2005, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Spreadsheet Workshop at the National Education Computing Consortium (NECC'05): EUSES members with the Oregon State University Department of Science and Mathematics Education presented a three hour workshop at this year's NECC. The focus was on teaching with spreadsheets from a dependability perspective.

May 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA
The International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE): At this year's ICSE, there were a number of papers and activities that were relevant to end-user programming and end-user software engineering:

• ICSE Workshop: The First Workshop on End-User Software Engineering, organized by Gregg Rothermel and Sebastian Elbaum of the University of Nebraska
• Four papers by EUSES Consortium members were on the ICSE program.
• There were also several co-located conferences that were also of interest.
• The keynote address at ProSim (one of the co-located conferences) was by EUSES member Mary Shaw, of Carnegie Mellon University.

April 2-7, 2005, Portland, OR, USA
Just out! Notes from the CHI'05 SIG on "End Users Creating Effective Software" are now available for download here.

September 2004
Communications of the ACM (September TOC) is a special issue on End-User Development.

September 2004, Rome, Italy
The IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC).

• There were a number of papers and talks on end-user programming.
• International Workshop on the Foundations of Spreadsheets (FoS'04), organized by Martin Erwig, was held in conjunction with IEEE VL/HCC.
• At IEEE VL/HCC, Susan Wiedenbeck lead a "Birds of a Feather" session.

At CHI'04 in Vienna, Austria, Brad Myers and Margaret Burnett organized a SIG on this topic, in April 2004