Ian Arawjo

I am an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Montréal in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO), where I am also affiliated with Mila. I lead the Montréal HCI group. In the recent past, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, working with Professor Elena Glassman in the Harvard HCI group.

The Montréal HCI group is recruiting PhD and Masters students! Our initial research will explore two areas: augmenting programming practice with multi-modal AI, akin to notational programming; and developing interfaces to help end-users evaluate large language model (LLM) outputs, especially for code. If you think you'd be a good fit, first read my Letter to Prospective Graduate Students. Then, if you are still convinced, drop me a line at my email or apply through DIRO or MILA-DIRO affiliation. If you are a stellar undergraduate, send me an email with a brief summary of who you are and what ongoing projects or domains you are interested in. There are opportunities to help out on existing projects, such as ChainForge, provided you have programming skill or experience in analyzing study data.

📩 Although I do my best to reply to emails, I receive a large amount of emails each day and cannot answer all of them in a timely manner.

Biography and past work

I hold a Ph.D from Cornell University in Information Science, where I was advised by Professor Tapan Parikh. My dissertation work spanned the intersection of computer programming and culture, investigating programming as a social and cultural practice. I have experience applying a range of HCI methods, from ethnographic fieldwork, to archival research, to developing novel systems (used by thousands of people) and running usability studies. My first-authored papers have won awards at top HCI conferences, including at CHI, CSCW, and UIST.

Currently, I am the creator and lead developer of ChainForge, the first open-source visual programming environment for prompt engineering. I am developing ChainForge out in the open with colleagues at Harvard CS: Elena Glassman, Priyan Vaithilingam, and Martin Wattenberg. In the recent past, I invented notational programming, a paradigm of programming where you can handwrite notation (diagrams, writing, etc.) that inter-operates with traditional typewritten code.

Recent Events

At Concordia University, my alma mater, I gave a workshop on ChainForge to sociology students ⛓️
I gave a talk to Kenneth Huang's group at PennState University about ChainForge ⛓️
Attended PLATEAU 2024 in sunny Berkeley, CA ☀️
A pre-print of our paper on Antagonistic AI 😈 was released to the public, where it garnered some interest in the press.
I gave a talk at Microsoft Research Montréal about ChainForge ⛓️
Our paper on ChainForge was accepted to CHI 2024! 🎉
Our paper on "An AI-Resilient Text Rendering Technique for Reading Documents" was accepted to CHI 2024! 🎉

Some other things I did in the past:

Served as an intern in the Machine Learning Research group at Apple, under Megan Maher and David Koski
Supported and studied the Nairobi Play Project, a UNICEF Kenya CS education initiative founded by Ariam Mogos, supervised by Kentaro Toyama, Steve Jackson, and Tapan Parikh.
Developed a game to teach novices Javascript semantics, with Erik Andersen, François Guimbretière and Andrew Myers. This project launched a new, comprehension-first way to teach coding with minimal tutorials and was played by thousands of people.
Designed a psychological game theory model of read receipts, with Arpita Ghosh and David Easley.
Graduated from Concordia University in Montréal with a degree in Computation Arts and Computer Science. There, I was active in the Montréal Indie Games community and published a game featured by Apple on the App Store.

👋 Want to support my work, or just say thanks? See here.