Title: Perceptual and Embodied Interfaces on Mobile Devices

Speaker: Jingtao Wang

Time: 23 May, 15:00

Location: FIT 1-515

Abstract: With an estimated 5.6 billion units in use, mobile phones have already become the most popular computing device in human history. Their portability and communication capabilities may revolutionize how people do their daily work and interact with other people in ways PCs have done during the past 30 years. Despite decades of experiences in creating modern WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interfaces, our knowledge in building effective mobile interfaces is still limited, especially for emerging interaction modalities that are only available on mobile devices.

My research in human-computer interaction focuses on understanding how emerging sensors on a mobile phone, such as the built-in camera, the microphone, the touch sensor, the gyroscope, and the GPS module can be leveraged to make everyday interactions easier and more efficient. In this talk, I present studies and models to quantify the capabilities of these sensing channels, and show how effective perceptual and embodied interfaces in text entry, gaming, and visualization can be built on mobile phones.

Bio: Dr. Jingtao Wang is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary research direction is Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Jingtao's current research interests include - mobile interfaces, education/learning technology, social computing, machine learning and its applications in HCI, and end-user programming. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before that, Jingtao was a researcher and team lead at the IBM China Research Lab, working on large-vocabulary, online handwriting recognition technologies for Asian languages. He received his master degree and bachelor degrees both from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.