Per Ola Kristensson

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Hi! I am a SICSA Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction and an EPSRC Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. I am interested in interdisciplinary research intersecting human-computer interaction (HCI) and the AI and machine learning fields. This includes gesture and touch-screen interaction, crowdsourcing, social signal processing, intelligent software design tools, and interfaces that visualise machine learning and other uncertain reasoning methods. I also have a long standing interest in text entry research, in particular gesture keyboards (commercialised as ShapeWriter/T9 Trace/Flext9 and Swype), speech recognition, and text entry for users with motor impairments.

A more detailed bio is available below.

Prospective PhD students: Intersted in doing research in human-computer interaction? Click here for information on doing a PhD supervised by me at St Andrews.

I have two overall research goals:

  1. To create interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives.
  2. To empirically contribute to our understanding of how users best interact with interfaces that are based on machine learning and other uncertain reasoning methods.

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Contact

The best way to reach me is via email:

   kristensson @ acm.org

Alternatively you can write to me at:

   Dr Per Ola Kristensson
   School of Computer Science
   Jack Cole Building
   North Haugh
   St Andrews KY16 9SX
   United Kingdom

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Bio

Per Ola Kristensson is a SICSA Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction and an EPSRC Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Previously (2008-2011) he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College). His research interests are in the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His research has been widely reported in the international press, including The Economist, Die Zeit and BBC World News. In 2005 he won the Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a premier publication venue in human-computer interaction. Together with Dr Shumin Zhai he pioneered gesture keyboard technology for touch-screens and co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology in 2007. He was the Director of Engineering of this company (2007-2010) and worked fulltime in Beijing, China in 2007-2008 to set up and manage the engineering office with about ten employees. The company was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application in the world by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award the same year. He did his doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA (Ph.D. Computer Science 2007). He is an Honorary Associate Professor (Docent) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University, Sweden.

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My academic genealogy.