Kenneth Arnold

MIT Media Lab

I'm a second-year Master's student at the MIT Media Lab in Henry Lieberman's group, Software Agents / the Commonsense Computing Initiative.

My resume

End-User Programming

Zones: Programming by Borrowing, Organized by Goals

In the Web era of programming, creative innovation is shifting from building from scratch to adapting and combining pieces in new ways. But our programming environments still tend to start you out with a blank slate. I want to help ordinary users to find, adapt, combine, and share pieces of code.

• To enable fluent composition of transplanted code, we need to describe the purpose of our code in simple natural language. I'm working on using the ConceptNet semantic network to extend search beyond keywords to semantically related terms.
• In a large body of projects, many chunks of code are potentially applicable. I'm working on extracting features from the transplant code to cluster implementations into canonical approaches, and from the surrounding code to identify particular implementations that come from contexts most similar to the new project.
• A programming-by-borrowing system integrated into the development environment can observe and learn from programmer behavior. I am working on learning patterns of changes and debugging behavior from a broad range of examples.

I have prototyped a code transplant system in Scratch. Demo available on request.

Common-Sense Computing

I wrote much of Open Mind Commons and Divisi.

Contact

Preferred contact method is email: kcar...@mit.edu