Hi, I'm Regina! I'm a researcher in Human-computer Interaction (HCI). I design and research community-driven and AI-powered technology to help people work with data and code. To do so, I conduct mixed method empirical research as well as develop research prototypes. More broadly, my research spans across the areas of programming support and education, creativity tools, and social computing.
Currently I'm an AIML resident at Apple, where I do research on UI support for developers in the Human Centered Machine Learning group.
I (very recently!) received my PhD from the Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) department at University of Washington (UW). I was advised by Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill and Dr. Jennifer Turns, and closely worked with Dr. Sayamindu Dasgupta. I have been part of the Community Data Science Collective research group. I received my Bachelor of Science degrees in Cognitive Science and Mathematics from University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where I did research in the Design Lab.
In my free time, I enjoy creating digital fanarts and illustrations and cuddling with my cat, Hime.
02/2024
My latest work at Apple is featured on Hugging Face! We present Keyframer, a system that employs the code generation power of LLMs to help user create and iterate on animation designs.
11/2023
I attended the workshop for EECS Rising Stars at Georgia Tech!
10/2023
I defended my PhD dissertation titled "Data Literacies in Informal Settings"!
07/2023
I joined Apple as an AIML resident in Human Centered Machine Learning!
03/2023
Happy to announce that our paper "Concepts, practices, and perspectives for developing computational data literacy: Insights from workshops with a new data programming system" has been accepted to the ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC 2023)! More details of the paper and the tools that we developed will be up soon!
12/2022
The preprint of the paper from my internship at Microsoft Research is up! We studied the role of online communities in shaping developers trust in AI code generation tools and explored the design space of integrating community signals into the AI-assisted programming experience!
11/2022
Presented two papers at CSCW'2022! Check out my papers "Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch" ( recorded talk) and "Feedback Exchange and Online Affinity: A Case Study of Online Fanfiction Writers" ( recorded talk)! These two papers investigate informal learning in online communities from very different angles :)
11/2022
Gave two talks at Microsoft Research about my work on developer trust in AI-powered code generation and informal learning of computaional skills in online communities!
10/2022
I gave a guest speaker talk at the Expertise@scale Salon at Emory University! I shared about my work on understanding and designing for informal learning in online communities.
09/2022
I hosted a Science of Community Dialogues webinar on "All Communities Are Learning Communities"! Along with Dr. Denae Ford, I shared my work on informal learning in online commnities with community leaders, designers, and other practitioners. Check out the blog post and the live recording of my talk!
09/2022
Wrapped up my research internship with the SAINTES team at Microsoft Research! I worked with my awesome mentors Dr. Denae Ford and Dr. Tom Zimmermann and many others! I designed and conducted projects related to online developer communities and AI-powered code generation systems. More about the papers from these projects will be posted soon! What a summer of learning and fun!
07/2022
Presented my paper "Mapping the Design Space of Human-AI Interaction in Text Summarization" at the NAACL2022 conference! Here are links to the paper and the Twitter thread. This was also my first time attending an NLP conference and it was eyeopening to see research at the intersection of language technology and AI! An Exploration of Post-Editing Effectiveness in Text Summarization" - another paper that I contributed to was also presented in the conference!
05/2022
Attended CHI'22 in-person! It was so fun to meet old and new friends and learn about cool research! I presented our paper "How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices' Use of Data Structures" that received the Best Paper Honorable Mention award! Check out the slides and the live recording of my talk!