Per Ola Kristensson

Per Ola Kristensson (May 3, 2022). Hi! I am a Professor of Interactive Systems Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. I lead the Intelligent Interactive Systems group, which belongs to the Engineering Design Centre. I am also a co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Contact

The best way to reach me is via email:

kristensson @ acm.org

Alternatively you can write to me at:

   Professor Per Ola Kristensson
   Department of Engineering
   Trumpington Street
   Cambridge CB2 1PZ
   United Kingdom

Opportunities

My research group is always open to new enthusiastic PhD students and post-doctoral scholars. A range of PhD projects are available. If you are interested then please do not hesitate to contact me. Support for post-doctoral scholars is available via a number of fellowship schemes. Again, please contact me for more information.

News

October 23, 2024 Our work on investigating the effects of construct and ecological validity when evaluating augmented reality systems for guided manual assembly in industrial environments has won the ISMAR 2024 Best Journal Paper Honourable Mention at the 23^rd IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR).
29 August, 2024 Our Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence has launched two new graduate programmes: (1) MPhil in Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence; and (2) PhD in Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence.
June 14, 2024 The Annual CHIA Conference on AI for Social Good has concluded. Many thanks to everyone who joined and shared their thoughts.
April 16, 2024 I am giving a talk on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good" in Toronto and Seattle, hosted by Cambridge in America.
November 23, 2023 The IEEE Spectrum technical magazine writes about our IEEE ISMAR 2023 journal paper: Song, Z., Dudley, J.J. and Kristensson, P.O. 2023. HotGestures: complementing command selection and use with delimiter-free gesture-based shortcuts in virtual reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 29(11): 4600-4610. Special issue on the 21^st IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2023). Link to pdf and IEEE archival version.
November 21, 2023 The multidisciplinary Institute for Technology and Humanity has launched. The Institute hosts three centres, one of which is our Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence.
April 12, 2023 Exhausted and happy that CHI 2023 in Hamburg has come to a successful close. The most attended CHI conference ever. Having served as a Technical Co-Chair overseeing all of the many tracks at CHI was a huge job but also massively rewarding. Many thanks to all volunteers, authors, reviewers, and attendees. The photo shows a selfie of the conference organisers in the final plenary (I am the second person in the photo from the left). There are approximately 4,000 people in the audience behind us.
August 1, 2022 Our edited book Bayesian Methods for Interaction and Design has been published by Cambridge University Press.
July 12, 2022 I am pleased to announce that University of Cambridge's Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) has officially launched. I am a co-founder and co-director of this exciting new research centre. The press release has further details.
March 30, 2022 Our work on investigating positive and negative qualities of human-in-the-loop optimization for designing interaction techniques has won a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 40^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022).
February 28, 2022 I have been awarded an EPSRC grant (Equitable Digital Society call). It will fund a Research Associate in my group for 3 years. It is a collaboration with Brunel University.
November 23, 2021 I have written an article for The Conversation on whether it makes sense to use predictive text.
November 5, 2021 I will serve as a Technical Program Co-Chair for CHI 2023.
July 27, 2021 I will be participating in a conversation with Anna Korhonen and John Suckling on placing humans at the centre of artificial intelligence, as part of the 2021 Cambridge Alumni Festival.
April 28, 2021 I am very happy to serve a second year as subcommittee co-chair for the CHI 2022 Subcommittee on Computational Interaction. This subcommittee is the result of a proposal I submitted together with Antti Oulasvirta to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee.
March 18, 2021 Our work on understanding, detecting and mitigating the effects of coactivations in ten-finger mid-air typing in virtual reality has won a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 39^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021).
March 15, 2021 I am a guest editor for the Special Issue on Computational Interaction in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. The submission deadline is 1 July, 2021.
March 6, 2020 Our work on introducing a design engineering approach for quantatively exploring context-aware sentence retrieval for nonspeaking individuals with motor disabilities has won a Best Paper Award at the 38^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020).
February 4, 2020 I am very happy to serve as an inaugural subcommittee co-chair for the CHI 2021 Subcommittee on Computational Interaction. This subcommittee is the result of a proposal I submitted together with Antti Oulasvirta to the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee.
October 18, 2019 Our work on dynamic reconfiguration of physical keyboards for virtual reality, published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, has won the Best Paper Award at the 17^th IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2019).
October 15, 2019 I have participated in the BBC radio show The Naked Scientists, discussing current and future accessible text entry systems for non-speaking individuals with motor disabilities.
October 4, 2019 I am interviewed in The New York Times on our recent progress in text entry research.
October 2, 2019 Our work on collecting and analysing mobile typing behaviour from a crowdsourced on-line experiment with 37,000 volunteers has won a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 21^st ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2019).
June 12, 2019 I have been promoted to a personal Chair (Professorship).
March 1, 2019 I have been awarded an EPSRC grant (Digital Economy Investigator-led Research Projects call). It will fund a Research Associate in my group for 3 years. It is a collaboration with Brunel University.
February 9, 2018 Our work on analysing how people type by collecting 136 million keystrokes has received a Best Paper Honourable Mention at the 36^th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2018).
January 10, 2018 Our edited book Computational Interaction has been published by Oxford University Press.
June 14, 2017 I have been promoted to a personal University Readership (approximately tenured associate professor).
June 13, 2017 I have been awarded an EPSRC grant (Design the Future 2 call). It will fund two Research Associates in my group for 36 months.
October 4, 2016 I have been admitted as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
June 20, 2016 I have taken up a position as Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI).
September 8, 2015 I have been awarded an EPSRC grant (User Interaction with ICT call). It will fund a Research Associate in my group for 3 years. It is a collaboration with the University of Dundee.
August 21, 2015 I have received a Google Faculty Research Award.
July 2, 2015 I have been awarded an EPSRC grant (Design the Future call). It will fund two Research Associates in my group for 18 months.
March 3, 2015 Our paper "VelociTap: investigating fast mobile text entry using sentence-based decoding of touchscreen keyboard input" received a Best Paper Award at the 33^rd ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015).
December 9, 2014 I am co-organising the CHI 2015 Workshop on Principles, Techniques and Perspectives on Optimization in HCI and the CHI 2015 Workshop on Text Entry on the Edge. If you are doing research in these areas then we want to hear about it! The workshops will be held on April 18 and 19, 2015 in Seoul, South Korea in conjunction with CHI 2015. See the workshop websites for the exact date of each workshop.
October 10, 2014

I have received the ACM User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Lasting Impact Award for the paper SHARK²: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers. It was published at UIST 2004. The citation reads: "Awarded for its scientific contribution of algorithms, insights, and user interface considerations essential to the practical realization of large-vocabulary shape-writing systems for graphical keyboards, laying the groundwork for new research, industrial applications, and widespread user benefit".
October 6, 2014 Our new group website is up! It is still a bit thin on content at the moment.
September 15, 2014 I have been appointed Honorary Reader in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.
June 9, 2014 I will take up a University Lectureship in in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge later this year.
May 14, 2014 I am quoted about the future of text entry in the latest report from the Pew Research Internet Project.
May 6, 2014 Our paper "AwToolkit: attention-aware user interface widgets" received a Best Paper Award at the 12^th ACM International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2014).
March 20, 2014 I have been awarded the Royal Society of Edinburgh Early Career Prize in Physical Sciences, the Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane Medal. See also here and here.
January 20, 2014 There's an article in Financial Times that quotes me about the current state of touchscreen keyboards and the future of text entry.
November 29, 2013 I am listed in The Courier Impact 100 at position 11. A scan of my profile in the newspaper is here.
August 21, 2013 I have been named an Innovator Under 35 (TR35) by MIT Technology Review. My profile is here. See also here, here, here, here and here.
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