Per Ola Kristensson

Hi! I am a Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. I am interested in interdisciplinary research intersecting the human-computer interaction (HCI) and the AI and machine learning fields. This includes gesture and touchscreen 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.

I lead the Intelligent Interactive Systems Group at the University of St Andrews, which currently consists of the following people:

• Jason Jacques (PhD student, 2012-)
• Shyam Reyal (PhD student, 2012-)
• Jakub Dostal, (PhD student, 2nd supervisor, 2011-)

We are part of the St Andrews HCI lab: SACHI.

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.

News

• April 28, 2013 MIT Technology Review has written a really nice article about our work on investigating the memorability of gestures in natural user interfaces.
• April 25, 2013 TechCrunch has written an awesome article about our KALQ keyboard optimised for thumb typing on touchscreen tablets (and a little about my previous work on gesture keyboards).
• April 12, 2013 ACM Computing Reviews has named our recent review article about foundational issues in touchscreen gesture design one of the Notable Computing Books and Articles of 2012. You can read our review article here.
• April 2, 2013 MIT Technology Review has written a nice comprehensive article about our work on Diff Displays.
• March 20, 2013 The Huffington Post writes about our work on Diff Displays that track visual changes on unattended displays. You can also listen to an interview with BBC Radio Scotland's Newsdrive (MP3 soundfile, 5.4 MB).
• March 11, 2013 I have been appointed a Member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland. See also here, here, here and here.
• December 13, 2012 I am co-organising the CHI 2013 Workshop on Grand Challenges in Text Entry. If you are doing research related to text entry we want to hear about it! Submission deadline is January 20, 2013. The workshop will be held on April 28, 2013 in Paris, France in conjunction with CHI 2013.
• October 25, 2012 Our paper "iSCAN: a phoneme-based predictive communication aid for nonspeaking individuals" received the ACM SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award at the 14^th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012). Lead author is Ha Trinh at the University of Dundee.
• September 28, 2012 The latest issue of the Communications of the ACM has published a Research Highlights article about our work on the gesture keyboard (SHARK/ShapeWriter). See also the introduction by Bill Buxton.
• April 5, 2012 Our paper on measuring users' experience of agency in their own actions received a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 30^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012).
• March 30, 2012 Our paper on the potential of dwell-free eye-typing for fast assistive gaze communication received a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 7^th ACM Conference on Eye-Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA 2012).
• February 22, 2012 New Scientist writes about our work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices: Crowdsourcing improves predictive texting. Click here for a screenshot of the front page. Our original research paper can be found here. The resources are here.
• More news...

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

Press Coverage and Impact on Society

• A list of international press articles referencing me or my work (2003-2013).
• The story behind ShapeWriter and gesture keyboard technology. (You may even have this technology on your mobile phone!) Read about a research project that led to numerous press articles, awards, and a tech start-up that was successfully acquired by Nuance Communications in 2010.

Academic service

• Demo Co-Chair, 26^th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2013).
• Workshop Co-Chair, 15^th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013).
• Associate Chair, 31^st ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013).
• Co-Organiser, CHI 2013 Workshop on Grand Challenges in Text Entry, held in conjunction with the 31^st ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013).
• Associate Chair, 26^th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2013).
• Associate Chair, 15^th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013).
• Senior Program Committee Member, 18^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2013).
• Local Arrangements Chair, 7^th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS 2013).
• Associate Chair, 7^th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2012).
• Associate Chair, 14^th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2012).
• Co-Organiser, CHI 2012 Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Text Entry Methods, held in conjunction with the 30^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012).
• Faculty Member, CHI 2012 Doctoral Consortium, at the 30^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012).
• Associate Chair, 30^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012).
• Judge, CHI 2012 Student Research Competition (part of the ACM Student Research Competition), at the 30^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012).
• Workshop Co-Chair, 17^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2012).
• Short Papers Co-Chair, British Computer Society (BCS) 26^th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2012).
• Program Committee Member, 3^rd Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT 2012), held in conjunction with the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2012).
• Program Committee Member, IUI 2012 Workshop on Developing Intelligent User Interfaces for e-Accessibility and e-Inclusion, held in conjunction with the 17^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2012).
• Program Committee Member, 1^st International Workshop on Pervasive Eye Tracking and Mobile Eye-Based Interaction (PETMEI 2011), held in conjunction with the 13^th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2011).
• Senior Program Committee Member, 13^th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2011).
• Program Review Committee Member, 13^th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2011).
• Program Committee Member, 16^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2011).
• Judge, ACM Student Research Competition 2010, Grand Finals.
• Program Committee Member, British Computer Society (BCS) 24^th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2010).
• Associate Chair, 28^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010).
• Faculty Member, CHI 2010 Doctoral Consortium, at the 28^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010).
• Judge, CHI 2010 Student Research Competition (part of the ACM Student Research Competition), at the 28^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010).
• Program Committee Member, 15^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2010).
• Technical Co-Chair, British Computer Society (BCS) 23^rd Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI 2009).
• Co-Organiser and Panelist, CHI Special Interest Group Meeting on Usable Intelligent Interactive Systems, at the 27^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009).
• Judge, CHI 2009 Student Research Competition (part of the ACM Student Research Competition), at the 27^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009).
• Program Committee Member, 14^th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2009).
• Reviewer, CHI (2004-2011; distinction for exceptional review 2004), UIST (2003-2011), IUI (2009-2011), InfoVis/IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2009), ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) (2004-2011), CSCW (2008-2010), Human-Computer Interaction (2004), SIGGRAPH Sketches (2006), ICMI (2005, 2009), Graphics Interface (2005, 2011), DUX (2005), MobileHCI (2006, 2011), NordiCHI (2008), IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2008), Behavior & Information Technology (2009), IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A (2010-2011), International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (2010).

University service

• Co-Organiser, SICSA Summer School on Inference and Dynamics in Interaction, University of Glasgow, 2012.
• Co-Organiser, SICSA Workshop on Mobile Interaction, University of Glasgow, 2012.
• Member, School of Computer Science Ethics Committee, University of St Andrews, 2011-2012.
• Co-founder of the St Andrews Computer Human Interaction (SACHI) Group, 2011.
• Fellow and Member of the Governing Body, Darwin College, Cambridge, 2008-2011.
• Organiser of the Darwin College Sciences Group seminars, Darwin College, Cambridge, 2010-2011.
• Executive Committee Member, Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, 2008-2009.

Teaching

• Lecturer, Human Computer Interaction, University of St Andrews, 2011-2013.
• Lecturer, Computer Science in Everyday Life (two lectures), University of St Andrews, 2011-2012.
• Lecturer, Research Methods for the MPhil ACS (three lectures), University of Cambridge, 2009.
• Guest Lecturer, Human-Computer Interaction (one lecture), University of Cambridge, 2009, 2010.
• Supervisor, Part II Dissertation and Human-Computer Interaction, University of Cambridge, 2009-2011.

Bio

Per Ola Kristensson is a SICSA Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction and an EPSRC Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He is interested in creating intelligent interactive systems that enable people to be more creative, expressive and satisfied in their daily lives. In particular, his research focuses on text entry interfaces and other interaction techniques. His research on gesture keyboard technologies, mobile speech recognition interfaces and crowdsourcing methods for statistical language modelling has been covered by international news media, including The Economist, New Scientist and BBC World News. External recognitions include serving as an Associate Chair for ACM CHI 2010, 2012 and 2013, a Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at ACM CHI 2005, and Best Paper Honourable Mentions at ACM CHI 2012 and ACM ETRA 2012. His PhD thesis was on gesture keyboard technology for touchscreens and in 2007 he co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology. He was the Director of Engineering of this company until it was acquired by Nuance Communications in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8^th best iPhone application 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). In 2008-2011 he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College). He is an Honorary Associate Professor (Docent) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Fun stuff

My academic genealogy.