PhD in Computer Science at the University of St Andrews: Human-Computer Interaction
I am a lecturer (approximately equivalent to tenured assistant professor in the US system) at the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK. Often we have PhD funding available for excellent and highly motivated students. If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in human-computer interaction (broadly interpreted) then feel free to contact me. Some further information about me can be found in my brief bio.
In general, I am interested in supervising a PhD that falls within one of the following broad areas:
- Gesture interaction via depth sensors and touchscreens
- Crowdsourcing and human computation
- Intelligent interactive systems
- Text entry methods
- Accessible user interfaces
- Social signal processing, context-aware user interfaces, ubiquitous computing
- Smart software design tools
- Visualisation of machine learning and other uncertain reasoning methods
If you are interested, email me at
pok@st-andrews.ac.uk and we can discuss an application.
My Research
Examples of current research I am doing:
- Inventing the next-generation text entry interfaces for mobile devices and new ubiquituous computing environments (such as wall-sized displays and wearable systems)
- Creating new efficient text entry methods for people with communication difficulties (due to for example motor disabilities)
- Designing and evaluating new interaction techniques, such as novel gesture-based interfaces and new ways of leveraging computer vision to design attention-aware user interfaces
- Understanding how we can use crowdsourcing to solve hard problems and conduct massive online experiments
- Designing end-user programming systems that enable non-programmers to create interactive artefacts
- And much more, see my publication list for more information.
A complete list of all my research publications can be found here.
You may also be interested in reading about the history of the gesture keyboard, a text entry method I co-invented ten years ago that is now widely available on many touchscreen devices.
I am heavily involved in the international academic community in human-computer interaction. Recent academic service include serving as Associate Chair for ACM CHI 2010, 2012 and 2013, Associate Chair for ACM MobileHCI 2011, 2012 and 2013, Associate Chair for ACM IUI 2013, Workshop Co-Chair for ACM IUI 2012 and ACM MobileHCI 2013, and Demo Co-Chair for ACM UIST 2013.
A couple of popular press accounts on my recent research can be found here and here. Click here for a full list of press articles about my research.
About the Research Environment
St Andrews viewed from a nearby hiking trail
The School of Computer Science is a member of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) and our research group in Human Computer Interaction is actively cooperating with the Universities of Dundee and Glasgow within the SICSA multimodal interaction theme.
The 600-year old world-renown University of St Andrews is completely integrated with the beautiful historic town of St Andrews, world-recognised as "the home of golf". The town is located north of Edinburgh at the east coast of Scotland. Despite its small size it has three sand beaches, seven golf courses, theatres, a cinema, world-class restaurants (including a Michelin star restaurant), and much more. It takes about an hour to travel to St Andrews via train from Edinburgh.
Check out this excellent photography website to get an idea of what the town looks like.