Jamar Sullivan Jr., Will Brackenbury, Andrew McNutt, Kevin Bryson, Kwam Byll, Yuxin Chen, Michael Littman, Chenhao Tan, Blase Ur. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

Personal cloud storage systems increasingly offer recommendations to help users retrieve or manage files of interest. For example, Google Drive’s Quick Access predicts and surfaces files likely to be accessed. However, when multiple, related recommendations are made, interfaces typically present recommended files and any accompanying explanations individually, burdening users. To improve the usability of ML-driven personal information management systems, we propose a new method for summarizing related file-management recommendations. We generate succinct summaries of groups of related files being recommended. Summaries reference the files’ shared characteristics. Through a within-subjects online study in which participants received recommendations for groups of files in their own Google Drive, we compare our summaries to baselines like visualizing a decision tree model or simply listing the files in a group. Compared to the baselines, participants expressed greater understanding and confidence in accepting recommendations when shown our novel recommendation summaries.

Prior work suggests that users conceptualize the organization of personal collections of digital files through the lens of similarity. However, it is unclear to what degree similar files are actually located near one another (e.g., in the same directory) in actual file collections, or whether leveraging file similarity can improve information retrieval and organization for disorganized collections of files. To this end, we conducted an online study combining automated analysis of 50 Google Drive and Dropbox users' cloud accounts with a survey asking about pairs of files from those accounts. We found that many files located in different parts of file hierarchies were similar in how they were perceived by participants, as well as in their algorithmically extractable features. Participants often wished to co-manage similar files (e.g., deleting one file implied deleting the other file) even if they were far apart in the file hierarchy. To further understand this relationship, we built regression models, finding several algorithmically extractable file features to be predictive of human perceptions of file similarity and desired file co-management. Our findings pave the way for leveraging file similarity to automatically recommend access, move, or delete operations based on users' prior interactions with similar files.

Users face many challenges in keeping their personal file collections organized. While current file-management interfaces help users retrieve files in disorganized repositories, they do not aid in organization. Pertinent files can be difficult to find, and files that should have been deleted may remain. To help, we designed KondoCloud, a file-browser interface for personal cloud storage. KondoCloud makes machine learning-based recommendations of files users may want to retrieve, move, or delete. These recommendations leverage the intuition that similar files should be managed similarly.

Trigger-action programming (TAP) is a programming model enabling users to connect services and devices by writing if-then rules. As such systems are deployed in increasingly complex scenarios, users must be able to identify programming bugs and reason about how to fix them. We first systematize the temporal paradigms through which TAP systems could express rules. We then identify ten classes of TAP programming bugs related to control flow, timing, and inaccurate user expectations. We report on a 153-participant online study where participants were assigned to a temporal paradigm and shown a series of pre-written TAP rules. Half of the rules exhibited bugs from our ten bug classes. For most of the bug classes, we found that the presence of a bug made it harder for participants to correctly predict the behavior of the rule. Our findings suggest directions for better supporting end-user programmers.

Data completeness is becoming a significant roadblock in data quality. Existing research in this area currently handles the certainty of a query by ignoring the incomplete part and approximating missing attributes on partially complete tuples, but leaves open the question of how the missing data affect the quality of the results. This is particularly challenging when entire tuples are absent, which can affect query certainty in ways that are not immediately obvious. To aid this, we propose cyadb , a database that "covers your ask" by assessing the quality of a query answer when data are missing. cyadb is a human-in-the-loop system, in which the data owner utilizes his or her domain knowledge of data to specify aspects of the missing data, such as where it might be missing ("where"), how many data points are missing ("how many"), and how large the missing data points could be in comparison to the provided data ("how big"). Using this, cyadb calculates the query's missing sensitivity, the maximal size of the effect that the missing data could have on the given query. Additionally, cyadb provides concrete examples of missing data that match the missing sensitivity to help the user interactively refine the provided domain knowledge.

In exploring representative databases, a primary issue has been finding accurate models of user preferences. Given this, our work generalizes the method of regret minimization as proposed by Nanongkai et al. to include nonlinear utility functions. Regret minimization is an approach for selecting k representative points from a database such that every user's ideal point in the entire database is similar to one of the k points. This approach combines benefits of the methods top- k and skyline; it controls the size of the output but does not require knowledge of users' preferences. Prior work with k -regret queries assumes users' preferences to be modeled by linear utility functions. In this paper, we derive upper and lower bounds for nonlinear utility functions, as these functions can better fit occurrences such as diminishing marginal returns, propensity for risk, and substitutability of preferences. To model these phenomena, we analyze a broad subset of convex, concave, and constant elasticity of substitution functions. We also run simulations on real and synthetic data to prove the efficacy of our bounds in practice.