Myers Among Authors of “Most Influential” Paper
News
For the third year in a row, HCII Professor Brad Myers will be among the authors honored with the Most Influential Paper award from a decade ago at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) July 28–Aug. 1 in Melbourne, Australia.
“It is just a coincidence that I’ve worked with a run of great students who all happened to submit great articles in consecutive years,” Myers said.
This year, he earns the honors for "Estimating the Numbers of End Users and End User Programmers" from VL/HCC in 2005 that he co-authored with then-PhD student Christopher Scaffidi and Mary Shaw, professor in the Institute for Software Research. The paper concerned so-called end-user programmers — people who program, but are not trained as professional programmers. Examples include people who author spreadsheets and web pages, as well as scientists who write code to analyze data and control their instruments.
After analyzing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the researchers estimated that 90 million end users would be in American workplaces by 2012, and that 55 million of them would use spreadsheets or databases and potentially be programming. They also predicted that 13 million of these end users would describe themselves as programmers, compared to there being fewer than 3 million professional programmers.
“Those were astonishing numbers,” Myers said, “which, along with the detailed analyses presented in the paper, has resulted in this paper being highly cited, and highly influential in getting more researchers to focus on this class of programmers, which generally has received little attention.”