Portrait of Damien Masson

Damien Masson

Associate Academic Member
Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research Department
Research Topics
Human-AI interaction
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
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Biography

Damien Masson is an assistant professor in human-computer interaction (HCI) in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. He obtained his PhD in the HCI Lab at the University of Waterloo.

His research focuses on building AI-infused systems that prioritize thoughtful interaction design to effectively solve tasks. Often, this involves going beyond traditional UI and interaction seen in software today. Currently, his projects relate to designing intelligent system to help creative writers, visualizing complex information, and augmenting digital documents to make them easier to understand.

Publications

How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined Abstractions
jingyue zhang
J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira
Elena L. Glassman
Damien Masson
Ian Arawjo
2026-02-01
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Making the Write Connections: Linking Writing Support Tools with Writer's Needs
Zixin Zhao
Damien Masson
Young-Ho Kim
Gerald Penn
Fanny Chevalier
2025-02-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Making the Write Connections: Linking Writing Support Tools with Writer Needs
Zixin Zhao
Damien Masson
Young-Ho Kim
Gerald Penn
Fanny Chevalier
2025-02-17
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories
Damien Masson
Zixin Zhao
Fanny Chevalier
We define"visual story-writing"as using visual representations of story elements to support writing and revising narrative texts. To demonst… (see more)rate this approach, we developed a text editor that automatically visualizes a graph of entity interactions, movement between locations, and a timeline of story events. Interacting with these visualizations results in suggested text edits: for example, connecting two characters in the graph creates an interaction between them, moving an entity updates their described location, and rearranging events on the timeline reorganizes the narrative sequence. Through two user studies on narrative text editing and writing, we found that visuals supported participants in planning high-level revisions, tracking story elements, and exploring story variations in ways that encourage creativity. Broadly, our work lays the foundation for writing support, not just through words, but also visuals.
2024-10-08
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Textoshop: Interactions Inspired by Drawing Software to Facilitate Text Editing
Damien Masson
Young-Ho Kim
Fanny Chevalier
2024-09-24
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
DirectGPT: A Direct Manipulation Interface to Interact with Large Language Models
Damien Masson
Sylvain Malacria
Géry Casiez
Daniel Vogel
2024-05-10
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org