Picture of Joel Brandt

Joel Brandt

Ph.D. Student in the HCI Group, part of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University
Address: Gates 372, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
Phone: 650-248-7953
E-mail: jbrandt@cs.stanford.edu

Research

I am currently a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Group, advised by Scott Klemmer. I study Opportunistic Programming, an approach to building software that enables rapid prototyping and ideation.


Publications

Papers and Presentations

  1. William Choi, Joel Brandt, Scott R. Klemmer. Rehearse: Coding Interactively while Prototyping. Poster at UIST 2008: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. October, 2008. (video)
  2. Joel Brandt, Philip J. Guo, Joel Lewenstein, Mira Dontcheva, Scott R. Klemmer. An Empirical Investigation of Opportunistic Programming: Interleaving Web Foraging, Learning, and Writing Code. Technical Report CSTR 2008-05. September, 2008.
  3. Joel Brandt, Philip J. Guo, Joel Lewenstein, and Scott R. Klemmer. Opportunistic Programming: How Rapid Ideation and Prototyping Occur in Practice. Workshop on End-User Software Engineering (WEUSE), Leipzig, Germany. 2008.
  4. Joel Brandt, Noah Weiss, and Scott R. Klemmer. Designing for Situations with Limited Attention. Technical Report CSTR 2007-13. March 30, 2007.
  5. Joel Brandt, Noah Weiss, and Scott R. Klemmer. txt 4 l8r: Lowering the Burden for Diary Studies Under Mobile Conditions. Work-in-progress, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), San Jose, California. 2007
  6. Joel Brandt and Scott R. Klemmer. Lash-Ups: A Toolkit for Location-Aware Mash-Ups. Poster, ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Montreux, Switzerland. 2006.
  7. Ron Yeh, Joel Brandt, Jonas Boli, and Scott R. Klemmer. Interactive Gigapixel Prints: Large, Paper-Based Interfaces for Visual Context and Collaboration. Video Presentation, International Conference of Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), Orange County, California. 2006.
  8. H. Rohrs, B. Bloom, D. Asher, J. Brandt, M. Reinders, R. Chhatwal, P. Berger, and W. R. Gentry. Inexpensive Mass Spectrometer for Field Applications. Poster, Workshop on Harsh Environment Mass Spectrometry, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. 2003.

Theses


Industry

During the summer of 2008, I interned in the Creative Technologies Lab at Adobe Systems. My excellent host was Mira Dontcheva.

During the summer of 2006, I interned at a small start-up in the valley called Google. I worked as an engineer on the personalized search team.

During spring and summer of 2005, I worked for Arc Second, Inc. (now Metris) developing application software for metrology. Most of my time was spent integrating various pieces of hardware to produce customer-specific applications. I also contributed to software and methodology for calibration and quality control.

From May 2003 to May 2004, I worked for Mass Sensors, Inc. Mass Sensors was a small start-up company in St. Louis focused on building small, inexpensive mass spectrometers. I developed firmware, research software, and application software for these devices. While Mass Sensors is no longer around, much of the intellectual property is owned by Ceramitron, Inc.


Past Work

Recently, I worked on Lash-Ups, a toolkit for the development of light weight location-aware applications.

I've also worked with Ron Yeh on GIGAprints. The mission of GIGAprints states that "The Interactive Gigapixel Prints (GIGAprints) project is an experiment in the future of collaborative workspaces, where printed visualizations are augmented with projectors and mobile devices. We designed, built, and tested interactions and visualizations that best suit these large paper surfaces."

I briefly worked with Ling Xiao on machine learning and visualization techniques for network intrusion detection, as part of Pat Hanrahan's Visualization Group. I was focused on visualization and analysis techniques for situational awareness within a large network. Sean Rosenbaum, Jiayi Chong, and I put together some ideas on using clustering techniques to aid exploration of large, complex data sets.

During my Master's work at Washington University in St. Louis, I was a member of Aaron Stump's Computational Logic group. My main area of research involved static algorithm verification through type checking. I completed a Masters Thesis on an inductive definition of manifold meshes. In this work, I present a set of rules for constructing manifold meshes that is sound and complete. Specifically, it guarantees connectedness, orientability, and manifoldness of any structure constructed. This definition is then embedded in the Edinburgh Logical Framework (LF), and encoded in Rogue-Sigma-Pi as a set of dependent data types. It is our hope that these data types can be used for static algorithm verification.

While I was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis, I was part of Ken Goldman's research group focused on the development of JPie, a live visual programming environment for Java. My work dealt with enabling live class hierarchy modifications within the system. A senior thesis on this work is available.


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