WikiDo: Enabling Configuration Independent Automation by Non-Expert Users
overview
The Internet has allowed collaboration on an unprecedented
scale. Wikipedia, Luis Von Ahn’s ESP game, and
reCAPTCHA have proven that tasks typically performed
by expensive in-house or outsourced teams can instead be
delegated to the mass of Internet computer users. These
success stories show the opportunity for crowd-sourcing
other tasks, such as allowing computer users to help each
other answer questions like “How do I make my computer
do X?”. The current approach to crowd-sourcing IT
tasks, however, limits users to text descriptions of task solutions,
which is both ineffective and frustrating. We propose
instead, to allow the mass of Internet users to help
each other answer how-to computer questions by actually
performing the task rather than documenting its solution.
This project presents WikiDo, a system that takes as input
traces of low-level user actions that perform a task on individual
computers, and produces an automated solution
to the task that works on a wide variety of computer configurations.
Our core contributions are machine learning
and static analysis algorithms that infer state and action
dependencies without requiring any modifications to the
operating system or applications.
WikiDo News
- WikiDo is featured in Spectrum
- KarDo, a startup based on WikiDo wins the IT track in the MIT $100K Business Competition.
papers
Enabling Configuration Independent Automation by Non-Expert Users,
Nate Kushman and Dina Katabi,
OSDI 2010. PDF
WikiDo,
Nate Kushman, Micah Brodsky, S.R.K. Branavan, Dina Katabi, Regina Barzilay, Martin Rinard,
ACM HotNets, 2009.PDF
people
Nate Kushman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dina Katabi
Massachusetts Institute of Technology