Andrew Head

Andrew Head is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He leads research on interactive reading and reasoning systems, working closely with Benjamin Pierce from PLClub and Chris Callison-Burch from PennNLP. He co-leads the Penn Human-Computer Interaction (Penn HCI) group alongside Danaé Metaxa and serves as a faculty affiliate for Penn's MindCORE center.

His research focuses on developing technology for interactive reading and reasoning, with specific goals of helping scientists get more from their readings, making mathematical notation understandable, assisting programmers with AI comprehension tools, and accelerating programmers in writing correctness proofs. His group follows a systems-centric HCI approach, conducting in-depth user studies followed by building interactive systems that are published at top venues like ACM CHI and UIST.

His publication record shows strong focus on human-computer interaction applied to programming environments, reading systems, and mathematical notation. Recent work demonstrates growing integration of AI techniques into interactive systems, particularly for code explanation and document augmentation. His research bridges theoretical programming language concepts with practical user needs.

• Best Paper Award, ICSE 2024 for Property-Based Testing in Practice
• Best Paper Award, CHI 2023 for CiteSee
• Nominated for Best Paper Award, CHI 2023 for Colaroid
• $1M NSF grant for Property-based Testing for the People project (2024)

Professor Head advises multiple PhD students including Alyssa Hwang, Litao Yan, Hita Kambhamettu, Jeff Tao, Jessica Shi, and Xiaorui Liu. His group works closely with PLClub and PennNLP researchers, and he has secured significant funding including a $1M NSF grant. His lab develops working interactive systems that emerge from thorough user studies, focusing on practical applications of HCI research.