Vincent Cavez

contact@vincentcavez.com

vincentcavez.com

Stanford University, CA, USA

2025 - 2026	Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford University
2021 - 2025	PhD in Computer Science, Univ. Paris-Saclay
2018 - 2020	MSc in Mathematical Engineering, Univ. Paris-Cité
2014 - 2018	BSc in Mathematics, Univ. Paris-Saclay

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University. I design and study digital tools that enrich human activities while making them feel simpler and more fluid, with a particular interest in gesture-based and voice interaction. My work spans creative practices, productivity, and learning. With Hari Subramonyam, I investigate just-in-time animation generation to support children’s storytelling. With my mentees, I develop tools for spelling, music practice, and physics learning through sketching. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Paris-Saclay University, advised by Emmanuel Pietriga and Caroline Appert. Since 2024, I am also the Webmaster of the ACM SIGCHI Paris Chapter.

I am currently on the job market for a postdoctoral position!

Research interests:

Interacting with AI Creativity Support Learning Sciences Interactive Surfaces

Latest News

Apr 2026 🗣 Presenting Tactus at CHI'26 in Barcelona

Feb 2026 🏆 Presenting SPIRE at LSTD@25 in Stanford

Dec 2025 🗣 SPIRE got accepted at IUI'26!

Nov 2025 🏆 Presenting my postdoctoral work at the ASHA Convention in Washington DC

International Publications

Opportunities to Support Musicians’ Score-based Practice with Context-Specific Annotations on Tablet

Xintian Fu, Vincent Cavez

CHI EA 2026

PDF Code DOI

Teaching Spell Checkers to Teach: Pedagogical Program Synthesis for Interactive Learning

Momin N. Siddiqui, Vincent Cavez, Sahana Rangasrinivasan, Abbie L Olszewski, Srirangaraj Setlur, Maneesh Agrawala, Hari Subramonyam

IUI 2026

PDF Poster DOI Bibtex

@misc{siddiqui2026teachingspellcheckersteach,
                                                                            title={Teaching Spell Checkers to Teach: Pedagogical Program Synthesis for Interactive Learning}, 
                                                                            author={Momin N. Siddiqui and Vincent Cavez and Sahana Rangasrinivasan and Abbie Olszewski and Srirangaraj Setlur and Maneesh Agrawala and Hari Subramonyam},
                                                                            year={2026},
                                                                            eprint={2512.12115},
                                                                            archivePrefix={arXiv},
                                                                            primaryClass={cs.HC},
                                                                            url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12115}, 
                                                                        }

EuterPen: Unleashing Creative Expression in Music Score Writing

Vincent Cavez, Catherine Letondal, Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga

CHI 2025

PDF Demo Presentation Code DOI Bibtex

@inproceedings{10.1145/3706598.3713488,
                                                                                        author = {Cavez, Vincent and Letondal, Catherine and Appert, Caroline and Pietriga, Emmanuel},
                                                                                        title = {EuterPen: Unleashing Creative Expression in Music Score Writing},
                                                                                        year = {2025},
                                                                                        isbn = {9798400713941},
                                                                                        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
                                                                                        address = {New York, NY, USA},
                                                                                        url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713488},
                                                                                        doi = {10.1145/3706598.3713488},
                                                                                        abstract = {Music notation programs force composers to follow the many rules of the staff notation when writing music and constantly seek to optimize symbol placement, making numerous adjustments automatically. Even though this impedes their creative process, many composers still use them throughout their workflow, for lack of a better option. We introduce EuterPen, a music notation program prototype that selectively relaxes both syntactic and structural constraints while editing a score. Composers can input and manipulate music symbols with increased flexibility, leveraging the affordances of pen and touch. They can make space on, between and around staves to insert additional content such as digital ink, pictures and audio samples. We describe the iterative design process that led to EuterPen: prototyping phases, a participatory design workshop, and a series of interviews. Feedback from the participating professional composers indicates that EuterPen offers a compelling and promising approach to music writing.},
                                                                                        booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
                                                                                        articleno = {760},
                                                                                        numpages = {16},
                                                                                        keywords = {digital pen, multi-touch interaction, ink, music engraving},
                                                                                        location = {
                                                                                        },
                                                                                        series = {CHI '25}}

Challenges of Music Score Writing and the Potentials of Interactive Surfaces

Vincent Cavez, Catherine Letondal, Emmanuel Pietriga, Caroline Appert

CHI 2024

PDF Preview Presentation DOI Bibtex

@inproceedings{10.1145/3613904.3642079,
                                                                            author = {Cavez, Vincent and Letondal, Catherine and Pietriga, Emmanuel and Appert, Caroline},
                                                                            title = {Challenges of Music Score Writing and the Potentials of Interactive Surfaces},
                                                                            year = {2024},
                                                                            isbn = {9798400703300},
                                                                            publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
                                                                            address = {New York, NY, USA},
                                                                            url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642079},
                                                                            doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642079},
                                                                            abstract = {Composers use music notation programs throughout their creative process. Those programs are essentially elaborate structured document editors that enable composers to create high-quality scores by enforcing musical notation rules. They effectively support music engraving, but impede the more creative stages in the composition process because of their lack of flexibility. Composers thus often combine these desktop tools with other mediums such as paper. Interactive surfaces that support pen and touch input have the potential to address the tension between the contradicting needs for structure and flexibility. We interview nine professional composers. We report insights about their thought process and creative intentions, and rely on the “Cognitive Dimensions of Notations” framework to capture the frictions they experience when materializing those intentions on a score. We then discuss how interactive surfaces could increase flexibility by temporarily breaking the structure when manipulating the notation.},
                                                                            booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
                                                                            articleno = {728},
                                                                            numpages = {16},
                                                                            keywords = {digital pen, ink, multi-touch interaction, music engraving},
                                                                            location = {Honolulu, HI, USA},
                                                                            series = {CHI '24}}

Spreadsheets on Interactive Surfaces: Breaking through the Grid with the Pen

Vincent Cavez, Catherine Letondal, Caroline Appert, Emmanuel Pietriga

ToCHI 2024

PDF Demo Presentation Code DOI Bibtex

@article{10.1145/3630097,
                                                                            author = {Cavez, Vincent and Appert, Caroline and Pietriga, Emmanuel},
                                                                            title = {Spreadsheets on Interactive Surfaces: Breaking through the Grid with the Pen},
                                                                            year = {2024},
                                                                            issue_date = {April 2024},
                                                                            publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
                                                                            address = {New York, NY, USA},
                                                                            volume = {31},
                                                                            number = {2},
                                                                            issn = {1073-0516},
                                                                            url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3630097},
                                                                            doi = {10.1145/3630097},
                                                                            abstract = {Spreadsheet programs for interactive surfaces have limited manipulations capabilities and are often frustrating to use. One key reason is that the spreadsheet grid creates a layer that intercepts most user input events, making it difficult to reach the cell values that lie underneath. We conduct an analysis of commercial spreadsheet programs and an elicitation study to understand what users can do and what they would like to do with spreadsheets on interactive surfaces. Informed by these, we design interaction techniques that leverage the precision of the pen to mitigate friction between the different layers. These enable more operations by direct manipulation on and through the grid, targeting not only cells and groups of cells, but values and substrings within and across cells as well. We prototype these interaction techniques and conduct a qualitative study with information workers who perform a variety of spreadsheet operations on their own data.},
                                                                            journal = {ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.},
                                                                            month = jan,
                                                                            articleno = {16},
                                                                            numpages = {33},
                                                                            keywords = {Digital pen, multi-touch interaction, ink, spreadsheets}
                                                                            }

Work in Progress

Structural Interaction for Generative User Interfaces

Vincent Cavez

PDF

How Structure Mediates Creative Activity Traces

Vincent Cavez

PDF

Structural Interaction: Shifting the Focus of User Interface Design

Vincent Cavez, Kashif Imteyaz, Anne-Flore Cabouat

PDF

PhD Thesis

Designing Pen-based Interactions for Productivity and Creativity

Vincent Cavez

Universite Paris-Saclay, 2025

PDF Poster DOI Bibtex

@phdthesis{cavez:tel-04986694,
  TITLE = {{Designing Pen-based Interactions for Productivity and Creativity}},
  AUTHOR = {Cavez, Vincent},
  URL = {https://theses.hal.science/tel-04986694},
  NUMBER = {2025UPASG013},
  SCHOOL = {{Universit{\'e} Paris-Saclay}},
  YEAR = {2025},
  MONTH = Mar,
  KEYWORDS = {Pen-Based interaction ; Touch-Based interaction ; Interactive data manipulation ; Spreadsheets ; Musical composition ; Artificial intelligence ; Intelligence artificielle ; Composition musicale ; Tableurs ; Manipulation interactive de donn{\'e}es ; Interaction tactile ; Interaction au stylet},
  TYPE = {Theses},
  PDF = {https://theses.hal.science/tel-04986694v1/file/135618_CAVEZ_2025_archivage-2.pdf},
  HAL_ID = {tel-04986694},
  HAL_VERSION = {v1},
}

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International Publications

Work in Progress

PhD Thesis

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