2013
- 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.
2012
- 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 14th 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 30th 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 7th 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.
2011
- 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 13, 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.
- August 12, 2011 We have released the source code for our new continuous recognition algorithm for pen strokes and touch-screen gestures. It enables interactive systems to eagerly process users' input before users have completed their input gestures. We used this algorithm to design two new visualisations. For further details see our SBIM 2011 paper.
- July 25, 2011 Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices enable users with certain communication difficulties to engage in conversations, typically via a predictive text input interface. However, a problem is the lack of representative corpora, and as a result, well-performing language models. To help this situation we have just released an AAC corpus and associated language models for conversational language modelling. For further details see our EMNLP 2011 paper.
- March 30, 2011 I have moved to the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews.
- January 24, 2011 I will take up a lectureship in human-computer interaction at the University of St Andrews at the end of March this year.
2010
- September 2, 2010 The Economist's Technology Quarterly writes about our speech recognition interface Parakeet.
- July 12, 2010 There is an article online in The Economist's Technology Monitor on my work on efficient touch-screen correction interfaces for speech recognition (with Keith Vertanen).
- June 23, 2010 Nuance's acquisition of ShapeWriter is reported in the media.
- May 28, 2010 Nuance Communications, Inc. has acquired ShapeWriter, Inc., a company I co-founded in 2007.
- February 3, 2010 I have been awarded a 3-year EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship that I will take up in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
2009
- December 17, 2009 There is an article about my work on efficient continuous speech recognition systems on mobile touch-screen devices in the Swedish trade magazine Elektroniktidningen. This work is in collaboration with Keith Vertanen in Cambridge.
- April 2, 2009 There is an article about ShapeWriter in the New Scientist magazine's Innovation column called Innovation: The mobile future of the keyboard.
- March 10, 2009 Razorfish names ShapeWriter one of the top 10 mobile applications to watch in its 2009 Razorfish Digital Outlook Report.
- January 26, 2009 TotallyHer selects ShapeWriter as one of the top ten iPhone applications for girls.
- January 5, 2009 InfoWorld picks ShapeWriter as one of the best iPhone applications. Read the entire article at InfoWorld.
2008
- November 12, 2008 Dagens Nyheter (the leading newspaper in Sweden) has published an interview with me on ShapeWriter. Also appeared in Ny Teknik (cover story).
- August 19, 2008 Time Magazine: ShapeWriter "must have" for iPhone. Read the entire article at time.com.
- July 16, 2008
A free demonstrator of ShapeWriter is available for iPhone and iPhone Touch via the Apple Appstore! Click this link to reach the download page via iTunes.
This version uses the mobile phone optimized version of the ShapeWriter recognizer I developed and implemented when I was working Beijing. It was challenging since recognition accuracy had to be the same as the full-scale Tablet PC recognizer I developed at Linköping University and IBM Almaden Research Center in 2002-2003, while at the same time both recognition latency and memory space requirements needed to be trimmed by an order of magnitude (this paper presents the original ShapeWriter recognizer). The lexicon in the application has 60,000 words in it. So far there are 77 user reviews and an average score of 4/5. The majority of complaints stem from a couple of unfortunate bugs in the initial "writing pad" application part of the demonstrator. These bugs were fixed in V1.0.1. Try it!
- May 9, 2008 ShapeWriter, Inc. is one of the winners in the Google Android Developer Challenge Part I! Our entry featured a full-blown ShapeWriter recognizer capable of recognizing 60,000 words (U.S. English) in realtime on the Android Emulator. All our code was written in Java using the Google Android SDK.