Bio

I'm an applied scientist in the Bedrock team at Amazon Web Services (AWS). My work is situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction, machine learning, and human cognition. Before joining AWS, I was a professor in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine. As a PhD student, I spent several summers with the Next-Generation Productivity group at Microsoft Research and the Emerging Technologies team at Mozilla Research. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo where I was a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

Publications

I am broadly interested in facets of interactive machine intelligence, ranging from data collection for model training to user studies of new systems, tools, or techniques. I publish my research at premier venues aligned to human-computer interaction research (e.g., CHI, CSCW, UIST). On occasion, I also write blogs.

2024

ACM IUI
Snapper: Accelerating Bounding Box Annotation in Object Detection Tasks with Find-and-Snap Tooling. Alex C. Williams, Min Bai, Jonathan Buck, Tristan McKinney, Amy Rechkemmer, Koushik Kalyanaraman, Matthew Lease, Patrick Haffner, Xiong Zhou, Kumar Chellapilla, Li Erran Li. 2024.
ACM IUI
Toward Faceted Skill Recommendation in Intelligent Personal Assistants. Manveer Kalirai, Alex C. Williams, Anastasia Kuzminykh. 2024.
ACM SUI
Annorama: Enabling Immersive At-Desk Annotation Experiences in Virtual Reality with 3D Point Cloud Dioramas. Subramanian Chidambaram, Alex C. Williams, Min Bai, Satyugjit Virk, Patrick Haffner, Matthew Lease, Li Erran Li. 2024.
EMNLP
Socratic Human Feedback (SoHF): Understanding Socratic Feedback Based Steering Strategies Used by Expert Programmers for Code-generation with LLMs. Subramanian Chidambaram, Li Erran Li, Min Bai, Xiaopen Li, Kaixiang Lin, Xiong Zhou, Alex C. Williams. 2024.

2023

AAAI HCOMP
Characterizing Time Spent in Video Object Tracking Annotation Tasks: A Study of Task Complexity in Vehicle Tracking. Amy Rechkemmer, Alex C. Williams, Matthew Lease, Li Erran Li. 2023.
ACM TOCHI
Managing Tasks Across the Work-Life Boundary: Opportunities, Challenges, and Directions. Alex C. Williams, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Julia Kiseleva, Ryen W. White. 2023.

2022

ACM CHI
Mobilizing Crowdwork: A Systematic Assessment of the Mobile Usability of HITs. Senjuti Dutta, Rhema Linder, Doug Lowe, Richard Rosenbalm, Anastasia Kuzminykh, and Alex C. Williams. 2022.
ACM CHI
“I Didn’t Know I Looked Angry”: Characterizing Observed Emotion and Reported Affect at Work. Harmanpreet Kaur, Daniel McDuff, Alex C. Williams, Jaime Teevan, and Shamsi T. Iqbal. 2022.
ACM CSCW
Motivated to Work or Working to Stay Motivated: A Diary and Interview Study on Working From Home. Judith Willemijn Borghouts, Gloria Mark, Alex C. Williams, Thomas Breideband. 2022.
IJCAI-ECAI
Dataset Augmentation in Papyrology with Generative Models: A Study of Synthetic Ancient Greek Character Images. Matthew I. Swindall, Timothy Player, Ben Keener, Alex C. Williams, James H. Brusuelas, Federica Nicolardi, Marzia D'Angelo, Claudio Vergara, Michael McOsker, and John F. Wallin. 2022.

2021

AAAI ICWSM
Classifying Reasonability in Retellings of Personal Events Shared on Social Media: A Preliminary Case Study with /r/AmITheAsshole. Ethan Haworth, Ted Grover, Justin Langston, Ankush Patel, Joseph West, and Alex C. Williams. 2021.
ACM CHI
Firefox Voice: An Open and Extensible Voice Assistant Built Upon the Web. Julia Cambre, Alex C. Williams, Afsaneh Razi, Ian Bicking, Abraham Wallin, Janice Tsai, Chinmay Kulkarni, and Jofish Kaye. 2021.
ACM GROUP
Characterizing Work-Life for Information Work on Mars: A Design Fiction for the New Future of Work on Earth. Rhema Linder, Chase Hunter, Jacob McLemore, Senjuti Dutta, Fatema Akbar, Ted Grover, Thomas Breidebad, Judith W. Borghouts, Yuwen Lu, Gloria Mark, Austin Z. Henley, Alex C. Williams. 2021.
IEEE eScience
Exploring Learning Approaches for Ancient Greek Character Recognition with Citizen Science Data. Matthew I. Swindall, Gregory Croisdale, Chase C. Hunter, Ben Keener, Alex C. Williams, James H. Brusuelas, Nita Krevans, Melissa Sellew, Lucy Fortson, and John F. Wallin. 2021.

2020

ACM CHI
Optimizing for Happiness and Productivity: Modeling Opportune Moments for Transitions and Breaks at Work. Harmanpreet Kaur, Alex C. Williams, Daniel McDuff, Mary Czerwinski, Jaime Teevan, and Shamsi T. Iqbal. 2020.
ACM CUI
Toward Voice-Assisted Browsers: A Preliminary Study with Firefox Voice. Alex C. Williams, Julia Cambre, Ian Bicking, Abraham Wallin, Janice Tsai, and Jofish Kaye. 2020.
NFW
Managing Tasks Across the Work-Life Boundary: Opportunities, Challenges, and Directions. . Alex C. Williams, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Julia Kiseleva, and Ryen W. White. 2020.

2019

ACM CSCW
The Perpetual Work Life of Crowdworkers: How Tooling Practices Increase Fragmentation in Crowdwork. Alex C. Williams, Gloria Mark, Kristy Milland, Edward Lank, and Edith Law. 2019.
ACM UIST
Mercury: Empowering Programmers' Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity. Alex Williams, Harmanpreet Kaur, Jaime Teevan, Ryen White, Shamsi T. Iqbal, and Adam Fourney. 2019.

2018

ACM CHI
Supporting Workplace Detachment and Reattachment with Conversational Intelligence. Alex C. Williams, Harmanpreet Kaur, Gloria Mark, Anne Loomis-Thompson, Shamsi T. Iqbal, and Jaime Teevan. 2018.
ACM CSCW
Creating Better Action Plans for Writing Tasks via Vocabulary-Based Planning.. Harmanpreet Kaur, Alex C. Williams, Anne Loomis-Thompson, Walter Lasecki, Shamsi T. Iqbal, and Jaime Teevan. 2018.

2017

AAAI HCOMP
Deja Vu: Characterizing Worker Reliability Using Task Consistency. Alex C. Williams, Joslin Goh, Charlie G. Willis, Aaron M. Ellison, James H. Brusuelas, Charles C. Davis, and Edith Law. 2017.
ACM CSCW
Seeing Sound: Investigating the Effects of Visualizations and Complexity on Crowdsourced Audio Annotations. Mark Cartwright, Ayanna Seals, Justin Salamon, A.C. Williams, Stephanie Mikloska, David MacConnell, Edith Law, Juan P. Bello, and Oded Nov. 2017.

2016

ACM CSCW
Crowdsourcing as a Tool for Research: Implications of Uncertainty. Edith Law, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Andrea Wiggins, Mary Gray, and Alex Williams. 2016.

2015

IEEE Digital Heritage
Proteus: A Platform for Born Digital Critical Editions of Literary and Subliterary Papyri. Alex C. Williams, Annapaola Santarsiero, Chiara Meccariello, Gertjan Verhasselt, Hyrum D. Carroll, John F. Wallin, Dirk Obbink, and James H. Brusuelas. 2015.

2014

ACM/IEEE TCBB
Improving retrieval efficacy in homology search using the false discovery rate. Hyrum D. Carroll, Alex C. Williams, Anthony G. Davis, and John L. Spouge. 2014.
IEEE BigData
A Computational Pipeline for Crowdsourced Transcriptions of Ancient Greek Papyrus Fragments. Alex C. Williams, John F. Wallin, Haoyu Yu, Marco Perale, Hyrum D. Carroll, Anne-Francoise Lamblin, Lucy Fortson, Dirk Obbink, Chris J. Lintott, and James H. Brusuelas. 2014.
IEEE eScience
Identification of Ancient Greek Papyrus Fragments Using Genetic Sequence Alignment Algorithms. Alex C. Williams, Hyrum D. Carroll, John F. Wallin, James H. Brusuelas, Lucy Fortson, Anne-Francoise Lamblin, and Haoyu Yu. 2014.

2013

BSB
False Discovery Rate for Homology Searches. Hyrum D. Carroll, Alex C. Williams, Anthony G. Davis, and John L. Spouge. 2013.
SPIE Medical Imaging
Automated assessment of bilateral breast volume asymmetry as a breast cancer biomarker during mammographic screening.. Alex C. Williams, Austin Hitt, Sophie Voisin, and Georgia Tourassi. 2013.

Last Updated: August 2023

Mentees

I've had the opportunity to mentor, collaborate with, and learn from a collective of exceptional people over the years.

PostdocHostYearsCollaboratorsCurrent Affiliation
Subramanian ChidambaramAmazon2022-2024LiApplied Scientist @ AWS
Rhema LinderUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2020-2022HenleyLecturer @ UTK
InternRoleSchoolYearCollaboratorsCurrent Affiliation
Zheng ZhangApplied ScientistNotre Dame2023Lease, Li, Li
Amy RechkemmerApplied ScientistPurdue University2022Lease, Li
Ken KingSoftware EngineerVirginia Tech2022Buck, Kalyanaraman
Yinan LangSoftware EngineerSteven's Institute of Technology2022Buck, KalyanaramanSDE @ Amazon
Hanyue ShiSoftware EngineerUW2022Buck, KalyanaramanSDE @ Amazon
Spencer DuSoftware EngineerUCSD2022Bai, BuckSDE @ Amazon
AdviseeTypeSchoolYearCollaboratorsCurrent Affiliation
Senjuti DuttaPhDUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2024Kuzminykh, Linder
Jacob McLemoreMSUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2023Henley, Bernholdt
Matthew RosenbalmUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2024Linder
Samuel BaumannUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2023LinderMS Student @ UTK
Abram BradleyUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2023Linder
Priya PatelUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2023Linder
Joshua MandzakUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2023LinderMS Student @ UTK
Jacob SamarUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022Mark, Linder
Racheal DylewskiUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022Linder
Selena XueUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022LinderSDE @ Amazon
Vishal AielyUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022LinderSWE @ Meta
Doug LoweUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022LinderSWE @ Jacobs
Danny ShekouryUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2022LinderSWE @ AllianceBernstein
Gregory CroisdaleUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2021Wallin, BrusuelasPhD Student @ UMich
Timothy PlayerUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2021Wallin, BrusuelasSWE @ Amazon
Rain HaworthUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2021Grover
Chase HunterUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2021Mark, Linder
Jimmy NevilleUGUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville2021MarkSWE @ raft
Yuwen LuUGUniversity of California, Irvine2020MarkPhD Student @ Notre Dame
Zongyao WangUGUniversity of California, Irvine2020MarkMS Student @ UMich
Jarvis XieUGUniversity of Waterloo2020LawMS Student @ UWaterloo

Archive

The "archive" contains miscellaneous information from other periods of time (e.g. during my professorship) that may be useful to others.

Teaching

At the University of Tennessee, I previously taught courses in three key areas of computing: human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Fall 2021
Spring 2021
Fall 2020

Last Updated: December 14, 2021

Prospectives

Each summer, the AWS AI Human-in-the-Loop Science team typically recruits interns to fill two types of roles: Applied Science (AS) Interns and Software Development Engineer (SDE) Interns.

  1. Applied Scientist Intern
  2. Software Development Engineer Interns
  1. Amazon's Applied Science internship program
  2. Amazon's Software Engineering internship program
  3. Amazon's Postdoctoral Science program
  4. .