Shumin Zhai (Chinese simplified: 翟树民) (born 1961) is an American-Canadian-Chinese
Human–computer interaction (HCI) research scientist and inventor. He is known for his research specifically on input devices and interaction methods, swipe-gesture-based touchscreen keyboards, eye-tracking interfaces, and models of human performance in human-computer interaction. His studies have contributed to both foundational models and understandings of HCI and practical user interface designs and flagship products. He previously worked at
IBM where he invented the
ShapeWriter ShapeWriter (previously known as Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding (SHARK)) was a keyboard text input method for tablet, handheld PCs, and mobile phones invented by Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson at IBM Almaden Research Center and the Departme ...
text entry method for smartphones, which is a predecessor to the modern
Swype keyboard. Dr. Zhai's publications have won the
ACM
ACM or A.C.M. may refer to:
Aviation
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Computing
* ...
UIST Lasting Impact Award and the
IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award, among others, and he is most known for his research specifically on input devices and interaction methods, swipe-gesture-based touchscreen keyboards, eye-tracking interfaces, and models of human performance in human-computer interaction. Dr. Zhai is currently a Principal Scientist at
Google where he leads and directs research, design, and development of human-device input methods and haptics systems.
Education
Born in
Harbin
Harbin (; mnc, , v=Halbin; ) is a sub-provincial city and the provincial capital and the largest city of Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China, as well as the second largest city by urban population after Shenyang and largest ...
,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
in 1961, Dr. Zhai received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982, and his master's degree in
Computer Science in 1984 from
Xidian University. After that, he served on the faculty of the
Northwest Institute of Telecommunication Engineering (now Xidian University) in
Xi'an,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
where he taught and conducted research in computer control systems until 1989. In 1995, received his PhD degree in
Human Factors Engineering at the
University of Toronto.
Career
From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Zhai was a visiting adjunct professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at
Linköping University, where he also supervised graduate research.
He was a consultant at
Autodesk in 1995 before joining
IBM Almaden Research Center
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...
in 1996.
From 1996 to 2011, he worked at the
IBM Almaden Research Center
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research org ...
. In January 2007, he originated and led the SHARK/
ShapeWriter ShapeWriter (previously known as Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding (SHARK)) was a keyboard text input method for tablet, handheld PCs, and mobile phones invented by Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson at IBM Almaden Research Center and the Departme ...
project at IBM Research 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.
In 2010,
ShapeWriter ShapeWriter (previously known as Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding (SHARK)) was a keyboard text input method for tablet, handheld PCs, and mobile phones invented by Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson at IBM Almaden Research Center and the Departme ...
was acquired by
Nuance Communications, and taken off the market. During his tenure at IBM, Dr. Zhai also worked with a team of engineers from IBM and IBM vendors to bring the ScrollPoint mouse from research to market, and received a CES award and millions of users.
From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Zhai was also the
editor-in-chief of the
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. At the time he had been deeply involved in both the conference side and the journal side of publishing HCI research as an author, reviewer, editor, committee member, and papers chair.
From 2011 till present, Dr. Zhai has been working at
Google as a Principal Scientist, where he leads and directs research, design, and development of human-device input methods and haptics systems. Specifically, he has led research and design of Google's keyboard products, Pixel phone haptics, and novel Google Assistant invocation methods. Notably, Dr. Zhai led the design of Active Edge, a headline feature of
Google Pixel 2, which enables the user to reach
Google Assistant faster and more intuitively using a gentle device squeeze rather than the touch screen.
Work
Dr. Zhai researches primarily in human-computer interaction, and is currently working on the research, design and development of manual and text input methods and haptics systems. Besides text input and haptics, his other research interests include system user interface design, human-performance modeling,
multi-modal interaction, computer input devices and methods, and theories of human-computer interaction. He has published over 200 research papers and received 30 patents.
Word-gesture keyboard
In 2003, Dr. Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson proposed a method of speed-writing for pen-based computing, SHARK (shorthand aided rapid keyboarding), which augments stylus keyboarding with shorthand gesturing. SHARK defines a shorthand symbol for each word according to its movement pattern on an optimized stylus keyboard. In 2004, they presented SHARK
2 that increased recognition accuracy and relaxed precision requirements by using the shape and location of gestures in addition to context based language models. In doing so, Dr. Zhai and Kristensson delivered a paradigm of touch screen gesture typing as an efficient method for text entry that has continued to drive the development of mobile text entry across the industry.
One of the most important rationales of gesture keyboards is facilitating transition from primarily visual-guidance drive letter-to-letter tracing to memory-recall driven gesturing. By releasing the first word-gesture keyboard in 2004 through
IBM AlphaWorks and a top ranked iPhone app called
ShapeWriter ShapeWriter (previously known as Shorthand-Aided Rapid Keyboarding (SHARK)) was a keyboard text input method for tablet, handheld PCs, and mobile phones invented by Shumin Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson at IBM Almaden Research Center and the Departme ...
WritingPad in 2008, Dr. Zhai and his colleagues were able to facilitate this transition and brought the invention from the laboratory to real world users.
Laws and models of action
One of Dr. Zhai's main
HCI research threads is
Fitts’ law type of human performance models. From 1996, Dr. Zhai, alongside his colleagues, has pursued research on “Laws of Action” that attempted to carry the spirit of
Fitts' law forward. In the
HCI context, Fitts' law can be considered the “Law of Pointing”, while they believe there are other robust human performance regularities in action. The two new classes of action relevant to user interface design and evaluation that they have explored are crossing and steering.
* “Law of Pointing”: Refining Fitts’ law models for bivariate pointing, 2003
* “Law of Steering”: Human Action Laws in Electronic Virtual Worlds - an empirical study of path steering performance in VR, 2004
* “Law of Crossing”: Foundations for designing and evaluating user interfaces based on the crossing paradigm, 2010
* Modeling human performance of pen stroke gestures, 2007
* FFitts' law: modeling finger touch with Fitts' law, 2013
* Modeling Gesture-Typing Movements, 2018
Manipulation and navigation in 3D interfaces
Dr. Zhai started working on multiple degrees of freedom (DOF) input during his graduate years at the
University of Toronto. In his
Ph.D. thesis, he systematically examined human performance as a function of design variations of a 6 DOF control device, such as control resistance (isometric, elastic, and isotonic),
transfer function (position vs. rate control), muscle groups used, and display format. He investigated people's ability to coordinate multiple degrees of freedom, based on three ways of quantification: simultaneous time-on-target, error correlation, and efficiency.
Eye-tracking augmented user interfaces
Dr. Zhai has been involved in two applications about eye-tracking augmented user interfaces, MAGIC pointing and RealTourist.
In 1999, he worked together with his colleagues (
Carlos Morimoto Carlos Eduardo Morimoto is the author of Kurumin, a Linux distribution based on Knoppix. It was the most popular Linux distribution in Brazil. After almost ending the project, due to many complaints from users in his forums and technical problems, ...
and Steven Ihde) at IBM Almaden Research Center and published a paper ''Manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing''. This work explored a new direction in utilizing eye gaze for computer input, showing that the MAGIC pointing techniques might offer many advantages, including less physical effort and fatigue than traditional manual pointing, greater accuracy and naturalness than traditional gaze pointing, and possibly faster speed than manual pointing.
In 2005, he developed and studied an experimental system, RealTourist, with Pernilla Qvarfordt and David Beymer. RealTourist lets a user to plan a conference trip with the help of a remote tourist consultant who could view the tourist's eye-gaze superimposed onto a shared map. Data collected from the experiment were analyzed in conjunction with literature review on speech and eye-gaze patterns. This inspective, exploratory research identified various functions of gaze-overlay on shared spatial material including: accurate and direct display of partner's eye-gaze, implicit deictic referencing, interest detection, common focus and topic switching, increased redundancy and ambiguity reduction, and an increase of assurance, confidence, and understanding. This study identified patterns that can serve as a basis for designing multimodal human-computer dialogue systems with eye-gaze locus as a contributing channel, and investigated how computer-mediated communication can be supported by the display of the partner's eye-gaze.
FonePal
FonePal is a system developed to improve the experience of accessing call centers or help desks. Known as "touchtone hell", voice menu navigation has long been recognized as a frustrating user experience due to the nature of voice presentation. In contrast, FonePal allows a user to scan and select from a visual menu at the user's own pace, typically much faster than waiting for the voice menus to be spoken. FonePal uses the Internet infrastructure, specifically Instant Messaging, to deliver a visual menu on a nearby computer screen simultaneously with the voice menu over the phone.
In 2005 and 2006, Dr. Zhai and his colleague Min Yin at IBM Almaden Research Center published two papers about this project. Their study shows that FonePal enables easier navigation of
IVR phone tree, higher navigation speed, less routing error and greater satisfaction. FonePal can also seamlessly bridge the caller to a searchable web knowledge base, promoting relevant self-help and reducing call center operation cost.
Awards and honors
Dr.Zhai is a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
(ACM) and a Member of the
CHI Academy. He has received many awards and honors. Among them:
*
IEEE Computer Society Best Paper Award
* One of ACM's inaugural class of Distinguished Scientists (2006)
* Member of the CHI Academy (2010)
* Fellow of the ACM.
(2010)
*ACM
UIST Lasting Impact Award (2014)
References
External links
Shumin Zhai's page on Google
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zhai, Shumin
Google employees
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Living people
1961 births