Benjamin Lafreniere

Ph.D. Candidate
Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada

email bjlafren {at} cs {dot} uwaterloo {dot} ca
office DC3591
phone 519-888-4567 x38318

Research Interests

Users of feature-rich software applications (Word, Photoshop, GIMP, etc) typically only use a small fraction of the functionality provided by the application, and even less in a single session of use. All of this unused functionality takes its toll, making interfaces difficult to navigate and hurting usability.

I am interested in how we can enable users to easily customize their interfaces to remove excess interface complexity and meet the needs of their current task. To this end, I am exploring the integration of social customization features into end-user applications.

The main focus of my current research efforts is AdaptableGIMP, a modified version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program that allows users to easily to create and share task-based interface customizations.

Academic History

University of Waterloo

• Ph.D. candidate (current)
• M.Math in Computer Science (2008)

University of Windsor

• B.Sc. Honours Computer Science (Software Engineering Specialization) (2005)
• Minors in Philosophy and Mathematics

Publications

• Ben Lafreniere, Andrea Bunt, Matthew Lount, Filip Krynicki, and Michael Terry. (2011) AdaptableGIMP: Designing a Socially-Adaptable Interface. Proceedings of UIST 2011 (Poster) [PDF] [Poster PNG]
• Benjamin Lafreniere, Andrea Bunt, John Whissell, Charles Clarke, and Michael Terry. (2010) Characterizing Large-Scale Use of a Direct Manipulation Application in the Wild. Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2010 (GI 2010) [PDF]
• Michael Terry, Matthew Kay, and Ben Lafreniere. (2010) Perceptions and Practices of Usability in the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Community. Proceedings of CHI 2010 [PDF]
• Peter Brass, Ferran Hurtado, Benjamin Lafreniere, and Anna Lubiw (2010) A Lower Bound on the Area of a 3-Coloured Disk Packing. (2010) International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications (IJCGA), v.20(3), pp.341-360
• Benjamin Lafreniere (2008) Packing Unit Disks. Master's Thesis, University of Waterloo, Waterloo ON, Canada, http://hdl.handle.net/10012/3907
• Peter Brass, Ferran Hurtado, Benjamin Lafreniere, and Anna Lubiw (2007) A Lower Bound on the Area of a 3-Coloured Disc Packing. Proceedings of the 19th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, August 2007, pp.101--104
• Angela C. Sodan, Garima Gupta, Lin Han, Lun Liu, and Benjamin Lafreniere (2008) Time and Space Adaptation for Computational Grids with the ATOP-Grid Middleware. Journal of Future Generation Computer Systems, v.28(6), pp.561--581
• Asish Mukhopadhyay, Samidh Chatterjee, and Benjamin Lafreniere (2006) On the All-Farthest-Segments problem for a planar set of points. (2006) Information Processing Letters, v.100, pp.120--123
• Benjamin J. Lafreniere and Angela C. Sodan (2005) ScoPred -- Scalable User-Directed Performance Prediction Using Complexity Modeling and Historical Data. Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 3834, pp.62--90

For more information on my publications and those of my coauthors, see my DBLP entry.