CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar   (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 11:30am-12:30pm PT · Gates B3 · Open to the public
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Shumin Zhai
Google
Modern Touchscreen Keyboards as Intelligent User Interfaces: A Research Review
March 10, 2017

Essential to mobile communication, the touchscreen keyboard is the most ubiquitous intelligent user interface on modern mobile phones. Developing smarter, more efficient, easy to learn, and fun to use keyboards has presented many fascinating IUI research and design questions. Some have been addressed by academic research and practitioners in industry, while others remain significant ongoing research challenges.

In this talk I will review and synthesize the progress and open research questions of the past 15 years in text input, focusing on those my colleaguges and I have directly dealt with through publications, such as the cost–benefit equations of automation and prediction, the power of machine/statistical intelligence, the human performance models fundamental to the design of error-correction algorithms, spatial scaling from a phone to a watch and the implications on human–machine labor division, user behavior and learning innovation, and the challenges of evaluating the longitudinal effects of personalization and adaptation.

Through this research program review, I will illustrate why intelligent user interfaces, or the combination of machine intelligence and human factors, holds the future of human-computer interaction, and information technology at large.

Shumin Zhai is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google. He works on fundamental and practical aspects of human-computer interaction, particularly user interface design and development informed by scientific and technology insight. From 1996 to 2010 he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center where he led product innovations and foundational user interface research. He originated and led the SHARK/ShapeWriter project and a start-up company that pioneered the touchscreen word-gesture keyboard paradigm, filing the first patents of this paradigm, publishing the first generation of scientific papers and dissertations (by his former Ph.D. student Per Ola Kristensson) of the area, publicly releasing the first word-gesture keyboard in 2004 through IBM Alphaworks, and a top ranked (6th) iPhone app called ShapeWriter WritingPad in 2008. With his team and colleagues at Google he continues to lead the state of the art of input and UI research and development. His publications have won the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award and a IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award. He regularly serves on academic boards and committees and served as the 4th Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. He received his Ph.D. degree at the University of Toronto in 1995. In 2006, he was named one of ACM's inaugural class of Distinguished Scientists. In 2010 he was named Member of the CHI Academy and ACM Fellow.