Tessa Lau

Researcher, IBM Almaden Research Center

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators
21 minutes, 9.6mb, recorded 2007-06-07
Tessa Lau

Collectively we hold a vast repository of knowledge about how to do all sorts of things on the web: order products, conduct searches, interact in social networks. But when we try to share that knowledge with others, our options are limited. We can write down sequences of actions, and maybe illustrate them with screenshots or even screencasts, but it would be great if we could transfer our experiential knowledge more directly.

Tessa Lau, a researcher with IBM's Almaden Research Center, is working with colleagues on a project that aims to make that direct transfer possible. The project, called Koala, is a system for recording, playing back, and sharing the performance of tasks on the web. In this conversation we discuss Koala's style of "sloppy programming," its clever way of abstracting away from personal information to create generic templates, and the challenges of building a universally reliable system for capturing and replaying web interaction.


Tessa Lau is a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Her work centers on intelligent user interfaces, a cross-disciplinary field that sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Her research focuses on programming by demonstration, whose goal is to enable regular end users to automate routine tasks simply by demonstrating to the computer what it should do. She recently served as Program Co-chair of IUI 2007, the international conference on intelligent user interfaces. Tessa completed her PhD at the University of Washington in 2001, spent four years at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center just north of New York City, and moved to California in late 2005. Outside of work, Tessa pursues a variety of interests including knitting, gardening, and flying remote-controlled model airplanes.

This free podcast is from our Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series.

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