reform

There is a lot of useful information on the Internet, but webmasters do not always present it in the best way. Reform lets end users put a new face on webpages, without subjecting to the whims of a webmaster, and without learning to program themselves.

Reform has a new intelligent web scraper that learns the structure of a page from a few examples given by the user. If you go to your bank account to display your balance, it will ask you what parts of the page are "times" and "amounts" of transactions. You click on them, and reform will learn the pattern and graph your spending history in a beautiful timeline visualization that the webmaster never implemented.

Our goal is to re-form the entire Internet. Please see the paper for more information on the long-term vision, and other example uses of reform.

Vision Statement:
Fellow citizens, some put forth that the Internet is a place for freedom of information and ideas. But are you really free from the webmasters who control what you can and cannot do on websites?

We present a technology, powered by Support Vector Machines and Dynamic Programming, for a new Internet. An Internet that leverages its 1.4 billion end users to improve its interface. An Internet where a Democracy adds features to Google, Facebook, and your bank's website. An Internet where you, not Mark Zuckerberg, control how you view your friends. An Internet that breaks the iron grip of the webmaster, and lets programmers and end users surf, hand-in-hand, mouse-in-keyboard, to a better tomorrow.com.

Collaborators

Publications

Attaching UI Enhancements to Websites with End Users Michael Toomim , Steven M. Drucker , Mira Dontcheva , Ali Rahimi , Blake Thomson and James A. Landay Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2009. Full Paper (PDF)