Per Ola Kristensson

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.

News

• December 2, 2011 I am co-organising the CHI 2012 Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Text Entry Methods. If you are doing research related to text entry we want to hear about it! The format will be a friendly series of panel discussions on timely topics in text entry. Submission deadline is January 20, 2012. The workshop will be held on May 5, 2012 in Austin, Texas in conjunction with CHI 2012.
• September 29, 2011 The University of St Andrews writes about our work on using crowdsourcing and online web sources to create better statistical language models for AAC devices. Twitter: it's good to talk.
• September 2, 2011 We have released our Enron mobile email dataset, a subset of the Enron email dataset. It consists of genuine mobile emails Enron executives wrote using their BlackBerry devices. It is primarily intended to increase the internal and external validity in mobile text entry experiments. We have added useful metadata for this purpose, such as sentence memorability, full-sized keyboard entry and error rates, and sentence category (business, personal, Enron-specific). For further details see our MobileHCI 2011 paper.
• 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 (2003-2011).
• 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

• Workshop Co-Chair, 15^th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2013).
• Local Arrangements Chair, 7^th ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS 2013).
• 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).
• 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.
• Lecturer, Computer Science in Everyday Life (two lectures), University of St Andrews, 2011.
• 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. 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 8^th 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.

Fun stuff

My academic genealogy.