Jack Williams

Jack Williams

I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research working in the Calc Intelligence team. My research interests span programming language design, LLM's for code, developer tools, data science, and type systems.

I am the research lead for Excel Labs, a collaboration with the Excel team to release experimental functionality. As part of Labs, we have brought multiple new capabilities to Excel:

During my research internship I helped design and build Calc.ts, the calc engine used by Excel for the web.

My PhD was at the University of Edinburgh working with Philip Wadler on contract semantics and gradual typing.

Email: jw ~at~ jackw ~dot~ io

Profiles: github linkedin microsoft research

Publications
ColDeco: An End User Spreadsheet Inspection Tool for AI-Generated Code (VL/HCC 2023)

Kasra Ferdowsi, Jack Williams, Ian Drosos, Andrew D. Gordon, Carina Negreanu, Nadia Polikarpova, Advait Sarkar, and Ben Zorn
MSR

FxD: a functional debugger for dysfunctional spreadsheets (VL/HCC 2023, Honorable Mention)

Ian Drosos, Nicholas Wilson, Andrew D. Gordon, Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan, and Jack Williams
MSR

"What It Wants Me To Say": Bridging the Abstraction Gap Between End-User Programmers and Code-Generating Large Language Models (CHI 2023, Honorable Mention)

Michael Xieyang Liu, Advait Sarkar, Carina Negreanu, Ben Zorn, Jack Williams, Neil Toronto, and Andrew D. Gordon
ACM

Where-Provenance for Bidirectional Editing in Spreadsheets (COLA 2022, VL/HCC special issue)

Jack Williams and Andrew D. Gordon
Elsevier

End-user encounters with lambda abstraction in spreadsheets: Apollo's bow or Achilles' heel? (VL/HCC 2022)

Advait Sarkar, Sruti Srinivasa Ragavan, Jack Williams, and Andrew D. Gordon
IEEE

LinkingPark: An automatic semantic table interpretation system (Journal of Web Semantics 2022)

Shuang Chen, Alperen Karaoglu, Carina Negreanu, Tingting Ma, Jin-Ge Yao, Jack Williams, Feng Jiang, Andy Gordon, and Chin-Yew Lin
Elsevier

Rows from Many Sources: Enriching row completions from Wikidata with a pre-trained Language Model (TheWebConf 2022)

Carina Negreanu, Alperen Karaoglu, Jack Williams, Shuang Chen, Daniel Fabian, Andrew Gordon, and Chin-Yew Lin
ACM

Where-Provenance for Bidirectional Editing in Spreadsheets (VL/HCC 2021)

Jack Williams and Andrew D. Gordon
IEEE

LinkingPark: An Integrated Approach for Semantic Table Interpretation (SemTab 2020)

Shuang Chen, Alperen Karaoglu, Carina Negreanu, Tingting Ma, Jin-Ge Yao, Jack Williams, Andy Gordon, and Chin-Yew Lin
PDF

Understanding and Inferring Units in Spreadsheets (VL/HCC 2020)

Jack Williams, Carina Negreanu, Andrew D. Gordon, and Advait Sarkar
IEEE

Higher-Order Spreadsheets with Spilled Arrays (ESOP 2020)

Jack Williams, Nima Joharizadeh, Andrew D. Gordon, and Advait Sarkar
Springer, Extended Version

Gridlets: Reusing Spreadsheet Grids (CHI EA 2020)

Nima Joharizadeh, Advait Sarkar, Jack Williams, and Andy Gordon
ACM, PDF

Spreadsheet Use and Programming Experience: an Exploratory Survey (CHI EA 2020)

Advait Sarkar, Judith W. Borghouts, Anusha Iyer, Sneha Khullar, Christian Canton, Felienne Hermans, Andy Gordon, Jack Williams
ACM, PDF

Design and Evaluation of Contracts for Gradual Typing (PhD Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2019)

ERA, PDF

The Root Cause of Blame: Contracts for Intersection and Union Types (OOPSLA 2018)

Jack Williams, J. Garrett Morris, and Philip Wadler
ACM, PDF

Mixed Messages: Measuring Conformance and Non-Interference in TypeScript (ECOOP 2017)

Jack Williams, J. Garrett Morris, Philip Wadler, and Jakub Zalewski
LIPIcs, PDF