Procedural Instructions for People and Machines
Floraine Berthouzoz, University of California, Berkeley
Monday, March 4, 2013, 4:30pm
Computer Science, 105

Procedural tasks such as following a recipe or editing an image are very common. They require a person to execute a sequence of operations (e.g. chop the onions, or sharpen the image) and people commonly use step-by-step tutorials to learn these tasks. We focus on the domain of photo manipulations and have developed tools and techniques to help people learn, compare and automate photo manipulation procedures. We present a demonstration-based system for automatically generating succinct step-by-step visual tutorials of photo manipulations. Our tutorials are quick to generate. Moreover, users are faster and make fewer errors with our tutorials compared to book and video tutorials. We also demonstrate a new interface that allows learners to browse, analyze and compare large collections (i.e. thousands) of photo manipulation tutorials based on their command-level structure. Finally, we present a framework for generating content-adaptive macros (programs) that can transfer complex photo manipulation procedures to new target images. Together these tools allow people to learn, compare and automate procedural knowledge.

Floraine Berthouzoz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of computer graphics and human-computer interactions, and aims at building tools that ultimately make it faster and easier for people to create high quality visual content. She has also developed a number of techniques that improve the way people learn procedural instructions. She is the recipient of a 2009 ETH Medal of Honor and a 2010 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. During her graduate studies, Floraine worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, the Hebrew University, Columbia University and Adobe Systems. Floraine also co-founded CS KickStart, an outreach program for incoming undergraduate women. Since 2011, this program has significantly increased the number of undergraduate women pursuing computer science degrees at Berkeley.