Success!
Yesterday I was notified that my research group’s submission to IUI’09 was accepted! This was the first research study and resulting publication that I led, and I’d honestly not been expecting it to be accepted on the first try. So yay! That’s two publications in a year and half–not a bad start, I suppose 
The paper detailed a formative study of barriers end users encounter when attempting to “fix” [i.e. debug] machine-learned programs, like junk mail filters or hand-writing recognizers. These sorts of machine-learned programs are becoming increasingly common in software, and since they need to tailor themselves to a particular user’s needs, that end user is the only person available to debug them if they misbehave. It’s really a whole new research field that can build upon existing data about end-user programmers debugging in more traditional environments, like Microsoft Excel, but the machine-learned component is a significant change from such traditional models of source code.
Now we have three weeks to address the reviewers’ comments and get a camera-ready version to the conference organizers. The conference itself is in Florida this February, so with a little luck, I might be able to afford to go and present the results in person
