After 11 years working in Microsoft Research studying technology use in homes and building technologies for families, in January 2016 I took a leap and joined the Microsoft Cortana product team with the goal of shipping the technologies I had been researching. For Cortana, I’ve helped drive far-field speech interaction experiences, ship Microsoft’s Cortana Invoke speaker and led Microsoft’s multi-assistant strategy including connecting Cortana and Alexa. I’ll share the lessons I have learned in my journey from doing research to being part of a team shipping features used by millions of people including some surprising similarities between working in research and product development as well as unanticipated differences. With the rapid adoption of digital assistants from a range of companies on many different hardware form factors this is an exciting time to be working on speech interaction and digital assistance.

The pervasive availability of voice assistants may support children in finding answers to informational queries by removing the literacy requirements of text search (e.g., typing, spelling). However, most such systems are not designed for the specific needs and preferences of children and may struggle with understanding the intent of their questions. In our investigation, we observed 87 children and 27 adults interacting with three Wizard-of-Oz speech interfaces to arrive at answers to questions that required reformulation. We found that many children and some adults required help to reach an effective question reformulation. We report the common types of reformulations (both effective and ineffective ones). We also compared three versions of speech interfaces with different approaches to referring to itself (personification) and to the participant (naming personalization). We found that children preferred personified interfaces, but naming personalization did not affect preference. We connect our findings to implications for design of speech systems for families.

Time of use tiered pricing schedules encourage shifting electricity demand from peak to off-peak hours. Charging times for electric vehicles (EV) can be shifted into overnight hours, which are usually off-peak. EVs can also be used as energy storage devices, available during certain peak hours to power a house with electricity stored during off-peak hours. Studies suggest both techniques are practical, but were based on simulated demand patterns or large commercial fleets. To investigate feasibility on a per home basis, we collected data from 15 EV homes using the Lab of Things sensing infrastructure. We evaluate a scheme that powers homes with their car battery during expensive electricity periods and then charges the battery during cheaper periods. We show an average potential savings of $10.91/month for shifting charging times, and an additional $13.58/month for powering the home from the EV, even accounting for the inefficiencies of electric conversion.

Today, it is not uncommon to find ourselves remote from those we care about. Despite the impact of mobile and social technologies on connectedness, recent studies suggest that it could be these very technologies that exacerbate a sense of loneliness. In attempt to help people feel more connected, we designed and created BodyPods, a remotely paired set of communicating chairs that facilitate a sense of presence by leveraging implicit actions such as sitting to communicate that someone you care about is home. Each BodyPod consists of a flexible surface with six pressure-sensitive and light-emitting pads that adjusts its shape to the body anatomy. As a person's body moves, limbs exert different pressure on each pad creating a live digital "bodyprint" that is mapped on the pads of other BodyPods through color and light. Findings from a 10 person user study suggest bodyprints may be distinctive, particularly among small groups of people with different body types.

People interact with chairs frequently, making them a potential location to perform implicit health sensing that requires no additional effort by users. We surveyed 550 participants to understand how people sit in chairs and inform the design of a chair that detects heart and respiratory rate from the armrests and backrests of the chair respectively. In a laboratory study with 18 participants, we evaluated a range of common sitting positions to determine when heart rate and respiratory rate detection was possible (32% of the time for heart rate, 52% for respiratory rate) and evaluate the accuracy of the detected rate (83% for heart rate, 73% for respiratory rate). We discuss the challenges of moving this sensing to the wild by evaluating an in-situ study totaling 40 hours with 11 participants. We show that, as an implicit sensor, the chair can collect vital signs data from its occupant through natural interaction with the chair.

Inspired by the availability of inexpensive connected devices-such as lights, water sensors, security cameras, power meters, and thermostats-we built the Lab of Things (LoT) platform to enable easy interaction with devices for a range of applications, including automation, security, energy management, and elder care. Our goal is to substantially lower the barrier for researchers and students to develop and experiment with new technologies for the home environment. LoT provides a common framework to write applications that use connected devices and includes a set of cloud services that enable remote command/control of devices, monitoring of system health, and data collection. We released the LoT SDK in July 2013 for non-commercial use. I will describe the research studies that motivated the development of Lab of Things, student and research projects developed using Lab of Things and its precursor HomeOS, and our long-term vision of research groups working together to create a test bed of homes around the world that are willing to participate in field studies.

Enabling phones to infer whether they are currently in a pocket, purse or on a table facilitates a range of new interactions from placement-dependent notifications setting to preventing "pocket dialing". We collected data from 693 participants to understand where people keep their phone in different contexts and why. Using this data, we identified three placement personas: Single Place Pat, Consistent Casey, and All-over Alex. Based on these results, we collected two weeks of labeled accelerometer data in-situ from 32 participants. We used this data to build models for inferring phone placement, achieving an accuracy of approximately 85% for inferring whether the phone is in an enclosed location and for inferring if the phone is on the user. Finally, we prototyped a capacitive grid and a multispectral sensor and collected data from 15 participants in a laboratory to understand the added value of these sensors.

In a neighborhood watch group, neighbors cooperate to prevent crime by sharing information and alerting police of suspicious activities. We propose a digital neighborhood watch (DNW) in which security cameras of individual homes work together to monitor the neighborhood. DNW could augment neighborhood watch by providing digital evidence of crime, increasing visibility of neighborhood activity, and automatically sending alerts when suspicious events occur. We investigate the appeal of sharing camera data with neighbors through semi-structured interviews with 11 households. Our participants validated the potential of sharing data with neighbors, particularly to provide evidence after an incident. But they also had security and privacy concerns about divulging their cameras' field of view and giving ongoing access to neighbors. For some participants, these concerns can be alleviated by enabling sharing of processed cameras views that include only the fore-ground activity or only public property (e.g., sidewalks).

We investigate how technology usage in homes has changed with the increasing prevalence of mobile devices including Tablets and Smart Phones. We logged Internet usage from 86 Belgium households to determine their six most common Internet Activities. Next, we surveyed households about what devices they own, how they share those devices, and which device they use for different Internet activities. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 of 55 households that responded to the survey in which participants explained their device usage patterns and where they use technology in their home. Our findings suggest that the nature of online activity and social context influence device preference. Many participants reported that their Desktop PC is now a special purpose device, which they use only for specific activities such as working from home or online gaming. Compared to past studies, we observed technology use in many more locations in the home, most notably kitchens and bathrooms.

Emerging mobile applications that sense context are poised to delight and entertain us with timely news and events, health tracking, and social connections. Unfortunately, sensing algorithms quickly drain the phone's battery. Developers can overcome battery drain by carefully optimizing context sensing but that makes programming with context arduous and ties applications to current sensing hardware. These types of applications embody a twist on the classic tension between programmer productivity and performance due to their combination of requirements.

No abstract available.

To explore the value of speech input focus for handling notifications, we built and deployed SpeechToast, an Outlook Add-in that replaces standard email notifications with a version that includes speech input commands (e.g. "open", "delete"). Notifications shown by SpeechToast have speech input focus when the audio context surrounding the computer is favorable for speech recognition. We deployed SpeechToast to 18 current users of email notifications for 4 weeks. Overall, speech input focus appealed to some participants, while non-users indicated their willingness to have it enabled as long as it did not detract from their experience. Our research suggests that selectively enabling speech input focus could provide natural and intuitive interactions that complement other input modalities.

Most location-aware mobile applications only make use of the user's current location, but there is an opportunity for them to infer the user's future locations. We present Trajectory-Aware Search (TAS), a mobile local search application that predicts the user's destination in real-time based on location data from the current trip and shows search results near the predicted location. TAS demonstrates the feasibility of destination prediction in an interactive mobile application. Our user study of TAS shows using predicted destinations to help select search results positively augments the local search experience.

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

Determining who is interacting with a multi-user interactive touch display is challenging. We describe a technique for associating multi-touch interactions to individual users and their accelerometer-equipped mobile devices. Real-time device accelerometer data and depth camera-based body tracking are compared to associate each phone with a particular user, while body tracking and touch contacts positions are compared to associate a touch contact with a specific user. It is then possible to associate touch contacts with devices, allowing for more seamless device-display multi-user interactions. We detail the technique and present a user study to validate and demonstrate a content exchange application using this approach.

Researchers who develop new home technologies using connected devices (e.g. sensors) often want to conduct large-scale field studies in homes to evaluate their technology, but conducting such studies today is quite challenging, if not impossible. Considerable custom engineering is required to ensure hardware and software prototypes work robustly, and recruiting and managing more than a handful of households can be difficult and cost-prohibitive. To lower the barrier to developing and evaluating new technologies for the home environment, we call for the development of a shared infrastructure, called HomeLab. HomeLab consists of a large number of geographically distributed households, each running a common, flexible framework (e.g., HomeOS [4]) in which experiments are implemented. The use of a common framework enables engineering effort, along with experience and expertise, to be shared among many research groups. Recruitment of households to HomeLab can be organic: as a research group recruits (a few) households to participate in its field study, these households can be invited to join HomeLab and participate in future studies conducted by other groups. As the pool of households participating in HomeLab grows, we hope that researchers will find it easier to recruit a large number of households to participate in field studies.

Most mobile phones and tablets support only two access control device states: locked and unlocked. We investigated how well all or-nothing device access control meets the need of users by interviewing 20 participants who had both a smartphone and tablet. We find all-or-nothing device access control to be a remarkably poor fit with users' preferences. On both phones and tablets, participants wanted roughly half their applications to be available even when their device was locked and half protected by authentication. We also solicited participants' interest in new access control mechanisms designed specifically to facilitate device sharing. Fourteen participants out of 20 preferred these controls to existing security locks alone. Finally, we gauged participants' interest in using face and voice biometrics to authenticate to their mobile phone and tablets; participants were surprisingly receptive to biometrics, given that they were also aware of security and reliability limitations.

Visions of smart homes have long caught the attention of researchers and considerable effort has been put toward enabling home automation. However, these technologies have not been widely adopted despite being available for over three decades. To gain insight into this state of affairs, we conducted semi-structured home visits to 14 households with home automation. The long term experience, both positive and negative, of the households we interviewed illustrates four barriers that need to be addressed before home automation becomes amenable to broader adoption. These barriers are high cost of ownership, inflexibility, poor manageability, and difficulty achieving security. Our findings also provide several directions for further research, which include eliminating the need for structural changes for installing home automation, providing users with simple security primitives that they can confidently configure, and enabling composition of home devices.

Home heating is a major factor in worldwide energy use. Our system, PreHeat, aims to more efficiently heat homes by using occupancy sensing and occupancy prediction to automatically control home heating. We deployed PreHeat in five homes, three in the US and two in the UK. In UK homes, we controlled heating on a per-room basis to enable further energy savings. We compared PreHeat's prediction algorithm with a static program over an average 61 days per house, alternating days between these conditions, and measuring actual gas consumption and occupancy. In UK homes PreHeat both saved gas and reduced MissTime (the time that the house was occupied but not warm). In US homes, PreHeat decreased MissTime by a factor of 6-12, while consuming a similar amount of gas. In summary, PreHeat enables more efficient heating while removing the need for users to program thermostat schedules.

People often search for local information (e.g., a restaurant, store, gas station, or attraction) from their mobile device. We show, via a survey of 929 mobile searchers at a large software company, that local searches tend to be highly contextual, influenced by geographic features, temporal aspects, and the searcher's social context. While location was reported to be very important, respondents looked for information about places close to their current location only 40% of the time. Instead, they were often in transit (68% of our searchers) and wanted information related to their destination (27% of searchers), en route to their destination (12%), or near their destination (12%). Additionally, 63% of our participants' mobile local searches took place within a social context and were discussed with someone else. We discuss these findings to present a picture of how location, time, and social context impact mobile local searches.

Newport is a collaborative application for sharing context (e.g. location) and content (e.g. photos and notes) during mobile phone calls. People can share during a phone call and sharing ends when the call ends. Newport also supports using a computer during a call to make it easier to share content from the phone or launch screen sharing if the caller is also at a computer. We describe Newport's system design and a formative evaluation with 12 participants to study their experience using Newport to share location, receive directions, share photos, and perform desktop sharing. Participants preferred using Newport to current methods for these tasks. They also preferred limiting sharing location to phone calls compared with publishing it continuously. Tying sharing to a phone call gives individuals a social sense of security, providing a mechanism for exchanging information with unknown people.

We present an empirical investigation of video-mediated free play between 13 pairs of friends (ages 7 and 8). The pairs spent 10 minutes playing with each of four different prototypes we developed to support free play over videoconferencing. We coded each interaction for the types of play and the amount of social play observed. The children in our study were largely successful in playing together across videoconferencing, though challenges in managing visibility, attention, and intersubjectivity made it more difficult than face-to-face play. We also found that our prototypes supported some types of play to varying degrees. Our contribution lies in identifying these design tradeoffs and providing directions for future design of video-mediated communication systems for children.

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication.

We argue that heterogeneity is hindering technological innovation in the home---homes differ in terms of their devices and how those devices are connected and used. To abstract these differences, we propose to develop a home-wide operating system. A HomeOS can simplify application development and let users easily add functionality by installing new devices or applications. The development of such an OS is an inherently inter-disciplinary exercise. Not only must the abstractions meet the usual goals of being efficient and easy to program, but the underlying primitives must also match how users want to manage and secure their home. We describe the preliminary design of HomeOS and our experience with developing applications for it.

Long-term personal GPS data is useful for many UbiComp services such as traffic monitoring and environmental impact assessment. However, inference attacks on such traces can reveal private information including home addresses and schedules. We asked 32 participants from 12 households to collect 2 months of GPS data, and showed it to them in visualizations. We explored if they understood how their individual privacy concerns mapped onto 5 location obfuscation schemes (which they largely did), which obfuscation schemes they were most comfortable with (Mixing, Deleting data near home, and Randomizing), how they monetarily valued their location data, and if they consented to share their data publicly. 21/32 gave consent to publish their data, though most households' members shared at different levels, which indicates a lack of awareness of privacy interrelationships. Grounded in real decisions about real data, our findings highlight the potential for end-user involvement in obfuscation of their own location data.

We introduce activity-based navigation, which uses human activities derived from sensor data to help people navigate, in particular to retrace a "trail" previously taken by that person or another person. Such trails may include step counts, walking up/down stairs or taking elevators, compass directions, and photos taken along a user's path, in addition to absolute positioning (GPS and maps) when available. To explore the user experience of activity-based navigation, we built Greenfield, a mobile device interface for finding a car. We conducted a ten participant user study comparing users' ability to find cars across three different presentations of activity-based information as well as verbal instructions. Our results show that activity-based navigation can be used for car finding and suggest its promise more generally for supporting navigation tasks. We present lessons for future activity-based navigation interfaces, and motivate further work in this space, particularly in the area of robust activity inference.

Technology makes it possible to share many different types of information with coworkers. We conducted a large-scale survey (N=549) to better understand current sharing among coworkers, how people stay aware of collocated and remote coworkers, and whether their willingness to share different types of awareness information changes based on the location in which the information is displayed. Contrary to our expectations, the display location did not greatly affect what respondents were willing to share. Our results also suggest considerations for researchers building situated displays, as respondents had concerns about unintended viewers and encouraging people to visit their personal space when they were not present.

Although domestic computer use is increasing, most efforts to reduce energy use through improved power management have focused on computers in the workplace. We studied 20 households to understand how people use power management strategies on their home computers. We saw computers in the home, particularly desktop computers, are left on much more than they are actively used suggesting opportunities for economic and energy savings. However, for most of our participants, the economic incentives were too minor to motivate them to turn off devices when not in use, especially given other frustrations such as long boot up times. We suggest research directions for home computer power management that could help users be more green without having to dramatically change their home computing habits.

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly personalized in terms of the data they store and the types of services they provide. At the same time, field studies have reported that there are a variety of situations in which it is natural for people to share their phones with others. However, most mobile phones support a binary security model that offers all-or-nothing access to the phone. We interviewed 12 smartphone users to explore how security and data privacy concerns affected their willingness to share their mobile phones. The diversity of guest user categorizations and associated security constraints expressed by the participants suggests the need for a security model richer than today's binary model.

All four of the most popular webmail providers ‐ AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! ‐ rely on personal questions as the secondary authentication secrets used to reset account passwords. The security of these questions has received limited formal scrutiny, almost all of which predates webmail. We ran a user study to measure the reliability and security of the questions used by all four webmail providers. We asked participants to answer these questions and then asked their acquaintances to guess their answers. Acquaintances with whom participants reported being unwilling to share their webmail passwords were able to guess 17% of their answers. Participants forgot 20% of their own answers within six months. What’s more, 13% of answers could be guessed within five attempts by guessing the most popular answers of other participants, though this weakness is partially attributable to the geographic homogeneity of our participant pool.

All four of the most popular webmail providers - AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! - rely on personal questions as the secondary authentication secrets used to reset account passwords. The security of these questions has received limited formal scrutiny, almost all of which predates webmail. We ran a user study to measure the reliability and security of the questions used by all four webmail providers. We asked participants to answer these questions and then asked their acquaintances to guess their answers. Acquaintances with whom participants reported being unwilling to share their webmail passwords were able to guess 17% of their answers. Participants forgot 20% of their own answers within six months. What's more, 13% of answers could be guessed within five attempts by guessing the most popular answers of other participants, though this weakness is partially attributable to the geographic homogeneity of our participant pool.

Everyday family life involves a myriad of mundane activities that need to be planned and coordinated. We describe findings from studies of 44 different families' calendaring routines to understand how to best design technology to support them. We outline how a typology of calendars containing family activities is used by three different types of families— monocentric , pericentric , and polycentric —which vary in the level of family involvement in the calendaring process. We describe these family types, the content of family calendars, the ways in which they are extended through annotations and augmentations, and the implications from these findings for design.

We present the results of our study of 15 working parents, and how they manage their life scheduling needs, that is, how they manage their personal and professional schedules across settings and calendaring tools. In particular, we discuss how their dual roles of parent and employee compel them to record personal information on their professional calendars and we detail the tensions that arise in doing so. Finally, we present suggestions for future calendaring applications that better support working parents in managing their life scheduling needs.

Repetitive strain injuries and ergonomics concerns have become increasingly significant health issues as a growing number of individuals frequently use computers for long periods of time. Currently, limited software mechanisms exist for managing ergonomics; the most well-known are packages that schedule and recommend typing breaks. Yet despite the proven benefits of taking breaks, such packages are rarely adopted due to the over-head of introducing periodic interruptions into a user's workflow. In this paper, we describe SuperBreak, a break-reminder package that provides hands-free interactions during breaks, with the goal of encouraging users to take more breaks and enhancing the benefits of those breaks. In a field study of 26 knowledge workers, 85% preferred SuperBreak over a traditional break-reminder system, and on average participants took a higher percentage of the interactive breaks suggested to them. Our results highlight the value of interactivity for improving the adoption and retention of ergonomic break practices.

Staying in touch with extended family members can be a challenge in part because of the time and effort required, even with the help of current technologies. To explore the value of sharing suggestions in sparking communication and facilitating sharing between extended families, we iteratively built SPARCS, a prototype that encourages frequent sharing of photos and calendar information between extended families. Results from a five-week field study with 7 pairs of families highlight a number of important features for an ideal sharing system to help families stay connected, including asynchronous chat and easily configurable sharing suggestions.

In this paper we present Family Accounts, a new user account model for shared home computers. We conducted a study with sixteen families, eight who used individual profiles at home, and eight who shared a single profile. Our results demonstrate that Family Accounts is a good compromise between a single shared profile and individual profiles for each family member. In particular, we observed that because Family Accounts allowed individuals to switch profiles without forcing them to interrupt their tasks, family members tended to switch to their own profiles only when a task required some degree of privacy or personalization.

Software can now track which computer applications and documents you use. This provides us with the potential to help end-users recall past activities for tasks such as status reporting. We describe findings from field observations of eight participants writing their status reports. We observed interesting trends, including the reliance on memory triggers, which were either retrieved from explicit self-reminders, from implicit breadcrumbs left while performing their tasks or directly from memory. Participants perceived spending relatively short amounts of time composing their status reports, suggesting that any technology solution must offer dramatic improvements over current practice.

Digital family calendars have the potential to help families coordinate, yet they must be designed to easily fit within existing routines or they will simply not be used. To understand the critical factors affecting digital family calendar design, we extended LINC, an inkable family calendar to include ubiquitous access, and then conducted a month-long field study with four families. Adoption and use of LINC during the study demonstrated that LINC successfully supported the families' existing calendaring routines without disrupting existing successful social practices. Families also valued the additional features enabled by LINC. For example, several primary schedulers felt that ubiquitous access positively increased involvement by additional family members in the calendaring routine. The field trials also revealed some unexpected findings, including the importance of mobility---both within and outside the home---for the Tablet PC running LINC.

Families must continually organize, plan, and stay aware of the activities of their households in order to coordinate everyday life. Despite having organization schemes, many people still feel overwhelmed when it comes to family coordination. To help overcome this, we present our research efforts on LINC: an inkable family calendar designed for the kitchen. LINC was developed using a participatory design process involving interviews, paper prototyping, and a formative evaluation. Our work outlines key implications for digital family calendars and family coordination systems in general. We found that coordination is not typically done through the family calendar; rather, the family calendar is a tool that provides family members with an awareness of activities and changes that in turn enables coordination. Thus, digital family calendars should provide tools that enable families to use their own coordination routines which leverage the social affordances prominent in existing paper calendars.

Ten years ago, Whittaker and Sidner [8] published research on email overload, coining a term that would drive a research area that continues today. We examine a sample of 600 mailboxes collected at a high-tech company to compare how users organize their email now to 1996. While inboxes are roughly the same size as in 1996, our population's email archives have grown tenfold. We see little evidence of distinct strategies for handling email; most of our users fall into a middle ground. There remains a need for future innovations to help people manage growing archives of email and large inboxes.

We describe a usage study of NetscanTech, a system that generates and publishes daily a range of social metrics across three dimensions: newsgroup, author, and thread, for a set of approximately 15,000 technical newsgroups in Usenet. We bring together three interlinked datasets: survey data, usage log data and social accounting data from Usenet participation, to triangulate the relationship between various user roles and differential usage of social metrics in NetscanTech. We found our most frequent users focused on information related to individual authors far more than any other information provided. In contrast, users that visited less frequently focused more on information related to newsgroups and viewing newsgroup metrics. Our results suggest features that designers and developers of online communities may wish to include in their interfaces to support the cultivation of different community roles.

We describe results from a survey of employees at Microsoft about how they manage personal and household scheduling. We saw a much greater use of digital calendars than we expected. Of our 621 respondents, 51% (317) used their digital calendar at work as the calendar where most of their personal and household events were recorded, while 38% (233) of respondents primarily used paper calendars. We discuss reasons respondents gave for choosing a particular type of calendar as well as challenges faced by respondents in scheduling events for themselves and their households.

Notification and shared annotations go hand-in-hand. Notification of activity in a shared document system is known to support awareness and improve asynchronous collaboration, but few studies have examined user needs and explored design tradeoffs. We examined large-scale use of notifications in a commercial system and found it lacking. We designed and deployed enhancements to the system, then conducted a field study to gauge their effect. We found that providing more information in notification messages, supporting multiple communication channels through which notifications can be received, and allowing customization of notification messages are particularly important. Overall awareness of annotation activity on software specifications increased with our enhancements

Increasingly, documents exist primarily in digital form. System designers have recently focused on making it easier to read digital documents, with annotation as an important new feature. But supporting annotation well is difficult because digital documents are frequently modified, making it challenging to correctly reposition annotations in modified versions. Few systems have addressed this issue, and even fewer have approached the problem from the users' point of view. This paper reports the results of two studies examining user expectations for robust annotation positioning in modified documents. We explore how users react to lost annotations, the relationship between types of document modifications and user expectations, and whether users pay attention to text surrounding their annotations. Our results could contribute substantially to effective digital document annotation systems.

In this paper, we explore the problem of interactively mauipulating plant models without sacrificing their botanical accuracy.The primary technical contribution of the paper is a method for interactively manipulating plant structures using a inverse-kinematics optimizatitin technique.The branches of the plant are endowed with flexural and torsional stiffnesses, and these are used in the IK optimization.We demonstrate our approach with several examples of plant models arranged in this fashion.