Michael Coblenz

Carnegie Mellon University

Computer Science Department, Fifth Year Masters student

mcoblenz@NOandrewSPAM.cmu.edu

I graduated in 2005 from Carnegie Mellon University with Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences (Discrete Mathematics and Logic). Here are a few of the things I've been up to...

JASPER

JASPER ("Java Aid with Sets of Pertinent Elements for Recognition") is an Eclipse plug-in that helps people perform programming tasks more efficiently, and is my Master's thesis.

Spreadsheet Error Detection

My senior honors thesis was on error detection in spreadsheets. I developed a new method of detecting certain kinds of errors in spreadsheets. Spreadsheet errors have been studied extensively. The idea is to annotate values in cells with units and labels, which contain information about the objects that the values measure. Then, carefully defining the usual spreadsheet operators can help the spreadsheet give additional information that users can use to find errors more easily. My thesis will be published shortly as a CMU Tech Report.

Publications

Michael J. Coblenz. JASPER: Facilitating Software Maintenance Activities With Explicit Task Representations. Technical Report CMU-CS-06-150, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. 2006. PDF: JASPER: Facilitating Software Maintenance Activities With Explicit Task Representations

Michael J. Coblenz. Using Objects of Measurement to Detect Spreadsheet Errors, Technical Report CMU-CS-05-150, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. 2005. PDF: Using Objects of Measurement to Detect Spreadsheet Errors

Abstract: There are many common errors in spreadsheets that traditional spreadsheet systems do not help users find. This paper presents a statically-typed spreadsheet language that adds additional information about the objects that spreadsheet values represent. By annotating values with both units and labels, users denote both the system of measurement in which the values are expressed as well as the properties of the objects to which the values refer. This information is used during computation to detect some invalid computations and allow users to identify properties of resulting values.

Michael J. Coblenz, Andrew J. Ko, and Brad A. Myers. Using Objects of Measurement to Detect Spreadsheet Errors. Proceedings of VL/HCC 2005, Dallas, Texas, September 2005. PDF: Using Objects of Measurement to Detect Spreadsheet Errors.
© IEEE 2005. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

Reid Simmons, Dani Goldberg, Adam Goode, Michael Montemerlo, Nicholas Roy, Brennan Sellner, Chris Urmson, Alan Schultz, Myriam Abramson, William Adams, Amin Atrash, Magda Bugajska, Michael Coblenz, Matt MacMahon, Dennis Perzanowski, Ian Horswill, Robert Zubek, David Kortenkamp, Bryn Wolfe, Tod Milam, Bruce Maxwell. GRACE: an autonomous robot for the AAAI Robot challenge, June 2003, AI Magazine, Volume 24 Issue 2. PDF: GRACE: an autonomous robot for the AAAI Robot challenge

JOSTI

Every year, I give some talks to a group of teachers who come to my high school (TJHSST) to learn about technology. I generally do a PHP/MySQL tutorial and perhaps one or two other things.

Slides are available:



KESHER

I'm co-chair of the local KESHER group, which is the group for Reform Jewish students. We host a chocolate seder every year. The haggadah is available for download in PDF format. Please contact me if you'd like a copy you can edit.