Steve Rubin
srubin at cs.berkeley.edu
I am a fourth-year CS Ph.D. student at Berkeley. In 2011, I graduated from Williams College where I majored in both Computer Science and Mathematics. I'm advised by Maneesh Agrawala.
Latest blog posts
1/29/2015 – speecheditor: an audio story editing tool
11/13/2013 – Browsers, Mechanical Turk, and external HITs
4/25/2013 – A web-first research methodology
- research
- background
- hobbies
- work
- classes
Research
I am broadly interested in HCI, music, media editing, information visualization, and design. In my time at Berkeley, I have worked on audio editing interfaces, crowdsourcing graphical perception studies, bribe-reporting, a cup that knows what you're drinking, and chart-data extraction.
My undergraduate senior thesis developed a methodology for visualizing large, highly symmetric communication graphs, such as process communication graphs from parallel programs.
Publications
Steve Rubin, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 27th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2014).
YouTube | Audio Results | Library for constraint-based score generation
Steve Rubin, Floraine Berthouzoz, Gautham Mysore, Wilmot Li, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 26th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2013).
YouTube | Audio Results | Code for audio construction/music retargeting
Steve Rubin, Floraine Berthouzoz, Gautham Mysore, Wilmot Li, Maneesh Agrawala
ACM 25th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2012).
Youtube | Demo | Code for audio construction
Manas Mittal, Wei Wu, Steve Rubin, Sam Madden, Bjoern Hartmann
2012 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW 2012).
(Poster and extended abstract)
Steven S. Rubin, advised by Duane Bailey
Senior thesis at Williams College (2010-11).
Old publications (unrelated to current interests)
Michael R. Frey, Laura E. Coffey, Lucas K. Mentch, Amy L. Miller and Steven S. Rubin
International Journal of Quantum Information, September 2010 (IJQI).
This work was done at the NSF-sponsored Quantum Information Theory REU at Susquehanna University in June/July of 2009.
Steven S. Rubin
The 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2009).
Finalist (top 5) in the Student Research Competition. This work was done during the Williams College Summer Science Research Program with Duane Bailey in 2008.
Software
I've written a lot of software for my research. I'm hoping to eventually release a lot of this code. Here's what I've released so far:
- speecheditor — a web app for editing and adding musical scores to audio stories. Instead of editing speech using waveforms, the speecheditor allows you to edit audio with text, like a word processor. Likewise, it allows users to easily loop musical tracks and add musical underlays à la This American Life. The speecheditor is described in detail in our paper, "Content-based Tools for Editing Audio Stories."
- radiotool — a python library that aims to make it easy to create audio by piecing together bits of other audio files. This library was originally written to enable my research in audio editing user interfaces, but perhaps someone else might find it useful.
Background
At Williams I served as president and root of Williams Students Online, competed on and co-captained the track and field team, and wrote a senior thesis with Duane Bailey. I also spent a semester studying math in Budapest, Hungary.
My undergraduate research, apart from my senior thesis, is completely orthogonal to my current research interests.
Hobbies
My hobbies include listening to music and going to shows
- my last.fm profile
- Sgt. Pepper's Strawberry Jam, my music blog
watching professional (and occasionally college) sports
- Go Steelers, Ephs, Bears, Lakers, Pirates, Sixers, Orange, and Tiger
working out and hiking, working on toy software projects,
- vinyl-fm (scrobble vinyl records automatically)
- lastday (cross-reference last.fm profile with black cab and daytrotter sessions)
- microphone (process streaming microphone input in the browser)
and, as of the Winter of 2013, snowboarding.
Work
Graduate student researcher — UC Berkeley
Spring 2015, 2013, 2012. Fall 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011
Research intern — Adobe Research
Summer 2014, 2013, 2012. Part-time in Fall 2012.Graduate student instructor — UC Berkeley
Spring 2015 – CS160 (User Interface Design, taught by Andy Carle)Spring 2014 – CS160 (User Interface Design, taught by Maneesh Agrawala and Björn Hartmann)
Classes
I've taken several classes as part of the requirements for the Ph.D. program at Berkeley.
- CS 260 — Research Topics in HCI (Hartmann)
- CS 262a — Advanced Topics in Computer Systems (Brewer)
- CS 270 — Combinatorial Algorithms and Data Structures (Rao)
- CS 280 — Computer Vision (Malik)
- CS 281a — Statistical Learning Theory (Wainwright)
- CS 294-10 — Visualization (Agrawala)
- CS 294-84 — Interactive Device Design (Hartmann)
- STAT 239a — The Statistics of Causal Inference in the Social Sciences (Sekhon)
Service
Paper reviewer
- ACM CHI – Conference on Human Factors in Comptuing Systems (2013, 2014)
- ACM UIST – Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2014)
- IEEE InfoVis (2014)