IdeaSynth: Iterative Research Idea Development Through Evolving and Composing Idea Facets with Literature-Grounded Feedback

Research ideation involves broad exploring and deep refining ideas. Both require deep engagement with literature. Existing tools focus primarily on idea broad generation, yet offer little support for iterative specification, refinement, and evaluation needed to further develop initial ideas. To bridge this gap, we introduce IdeaSynth, a research idea development system that uses LLMs to provide literature-grounded feedback for articulating research problems, solutions, evaluations, and contributions. IdeaSynth represents these idea facets as nodes on a canvas, and allow researchers to iteratively refine them by creating and exploring variations and composing them. Our lab study (N=20) showed that participants, while using IdeaSynth, explored more alternative ideas and expanded initial ideas with more details compared to a strong LLM-based baseline. Our deployment study (N=7) demonstrated that participants effectively used IdeaSynth for real-world research projects at various ideation stages from developing initial ideas to revising framings of mature manuscripts, highlighting the possibilities to adopt IdeaSynth in researcher's workflows.

DiLogics: Creating Web Automation Programs With Diverse Logics

Knowledge workers frequently encounter repetitive web data entry tasks, like updating records or placing orders. Web automation increases productivity, but translating tasks to web actions accurately and extending to new specifications is challenging. Existing tools can automate tasks that perform the same logical trace of UI actions (e.g., input text in each field in order), but do not support tasks requiring different executions based on varied input conditions. We present DiLogics, a programming-by-demonstration system that utilizes NLP to assist users in creating web automation programs that handle diverse specifications. DiLogics first semantically segments input data to structured task steps. By recording user demonstrations for each step, DiLogics generalizes the web macros to novel but semantically similar task requirements. Our evaluation showed that non-experts can effectively use DiLogics to create automation programs that fulfill diverse input instructions. DiLogics provides an efficient, intuitive, and expressive method for developing web automation programs satisfying diverse specifications.