PLATEAU2026
16th annual workshop on the intersection of HCI and PL
@ Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA March 9th and 10th, 2026

PLATEAU 2026 Program
Day 1
Welcome and Intro
10:00 AM–10:15 AM
Specifications
What's in a specification?: Exploring Student Conceptions of Formal Specifications,
Harrison Goldstein, Cameron Moy, Daniel Patterson
10:15 AM–10:30 AM
Synthesizing Visual Specifications,
Yiliang Liang, Eunsuk Kang, Joshua Sunshine
10:30 AM–10:55 AM
Coffee Break
10:55 AM–11:10 AM
Execution + Visualization
A Semantically Grounded Visualization of React Hooks,
Jay Lee, Kwangkeun Yi
11:10 AM–11:25 AM
Tracers for debugging and program exploration,
Shardul Chiplunkar, Clément Pit-Claudel
11:25 AM–11:40 AM
Literate Execution,
Joseph Bond, Jacob Pake, Cristina David, Andrew McNutt, Trevor Muwonge, Dominic Orchard, Roly Perera, Joseph Bond
11:40 AM–12:05 PM
Lunch
12:05 PM–1:25 PM
Types + Prompts
Towards Typed Conversational Interfaces,
Chris Martens, Manas Aggrawal
1:25 PM–1:50 PM
Security Types for Usable Permissions Prompts,
Christine Glascott, Hemant Gouni, Jonathan Aldrich
1:50 PM–2:05 PM
Coffee Break
2:05 PM–2:20 PM
Question-Oriented Tools
Making Natural Language Programming Harder,
Vivian Chan, Xiaorui, Sarah
2:20 PM–2:40 PM
Aporia: Asking Questions to Elicit User Decisions,
Saketh Kasibatla, Sorin Lerner, Hila Peleg, Benjamin Pierce, Harrison Goldstein, Harrison Goldstein
2:40 PM–3:00 PM
Coffee Break
3:00 PM–3:15 PM
Proofs and Proving
Explorable Theorems: Navigating the Landscape of Mathematical Truths through Interactive Assumption Perturbation,
Hita Kambhamettu, Sean Welleck, Andrew Head
3:15 PM–3:30 PM
Bridging the gap to autoformalize free-form human reasoning,
Chenjun Guo, Manooshree Patel, Arnav Mehta, Rayna Bhattacharyya, Thomas Lu, Niels Voss, Bjoern Hartmann, J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Sarah E. Chasins, Gireeja Ranade
3:30 PM–3:50 PM
Is truth futureproof? On the possible futures of mechanized proofs,
Chris Martens, Emma Tosch, Elan Semenova, Cynthia Li
3:50 PM–4:15 PM
Day 1 Wrap Up!
4:15 PM–4:30 PM

Day 2
Debugging
Does Back-stepping Help Programmers Debug?,
Léonard Oest O'Leary, Jingyue Zhang, Olivier Melançon, Ian Arawjo, Marc Feeley
10:00 AM–10:25 AM
Data-Oriented Debugging with autopsy,
Jeffrey Tao, Xiaorui Liu, Ryan Marcus, Andrew Head
10:25 AM–10:50 AM
Alethiometer - A Debugger for Program Verification,
Long Tien Nguyen, Jonathan Aldrich
10:50 AM–11:15 AM
Coffee Break
11:15 AM–11:45 AM
Activity
Group Activity!,
11:45 AM–12:45 PM
Lunch
12:45 PM–2:05 PM
Direct Manipulation, Live Programming, and Thoughts
The Blurry Boundaries Between Programming and Direct Use,
Joshua Horowitz
2:05 PM–2:25 PM
Technical Dimensions of Live Feedback in Programming Systems,
Joshua Horowitz
2:25 PM–2:45 PM
Peapods: A Modular, Reproducible, and Versionable Notebook of Notebooks,
Ayla Kurdak, Michael Coblenz
2:45 PM–3:05 PM
Theories of Mind as Languages of Thought,
Kartik Chandra, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, Rebecca Saxe, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
3:05 PM–3:20 PM
Day 2 Wrap Up!
3:20 PM–3:30 PM
Important Dates
Wednesday, December 17th, 2025 (AoE time)
Paper Submission
March 9th and 10th, 2026
Workshop
Registration Site
Mentors
Titus Barik
Apple
Alan Blackwell
University of Cambridge
Will Crichton
Brown University
Michael Coblenz
University of California, San Diego
Harry Goldstein
University of Buffalo
Andy Gordon
Cogna
Mark Guzdial
University of Michigan
Andrew Head
University of Pennsylvania
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Brown University
Thomas D. LaToza
George Mason University
Toby Li
Notre Dame
Brad Myers
Carnegie Mellon University
Tim Nelson
Brown University
Wode "Nimo" Ni
Brilliant
Steve Oney
University of Michigan
Hila Peleg
Technion
Nadia Polikarpova
University of California, San Diego
Joe Gibbs Politz
University of California, San Diego
Mark Santolucito
Barnard College
April Wang
ETH Zürich
J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira
University of California, Los Angeles
Organizing Committee
Sarah E. Chasins
University of California, Berkeley
Joshua Sunshine
Carnegie Mellon University
Student Organizers
Justin Lubin
University of California, Berkeley
Yiliang "Leo" Liang
Carnegie Mellon University
Eric Rawn
University of California, Berkeley