In Search of Text Writing Methods for Off Desktop Computing: ATOMIK and SHARK

Speaker
Shumin Zhai
Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Research Center

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

It is generally recognized that todays frontier of HCI research lies beyond the traditional desktop computers. Many user interface challenges arise without the desktop physical UI foundation: a large display, a pointing device (mouse), and a full desktop keyboard. Text writing is one of these hard challenges awaiting a satisfactory solution in off-desktop computing. Such a need has set off the search of efficient text input methods alternative to the traditional typewriter keyboard.

This seminar gives an overview of two projects my colleagues (B.A. Smith, P-O. Kristensson et al) and I have undertaken at the IBM Almaden Research Center in this pursuit. The first is ATOMIK (alphabetically tuned and optimized mobile interface keyboard) a virtual keyboard for stylus typing. We optimized ATOMIK with a Metropolis algorithm in which the keyboard was viewed as a “molecule” and each key as an “atom”. The “atomic” interactions among all of the keys drove the movement efficiency to the maximum. We also tuned the layout to obtain alphabetical tendency and high connectivity of the most common words, in order to ease the user’s initial learning experience. The second project is SHARK (shorthand aided rapid keyboarding). For each word, SHARK defines a shorthand graph on a stylus keyboard, a “sokgraph”, based on the movement pattern of the word on the ATOMIK layout. Using pattern recognition, the system interprets user’s gesture accordingly. I will present the key rationales of SHARK: (1) the expressive power of a pen as an input device, (2) high efficiency, (3) visual constraint (scale and location) relaxation, (4) the power of Zipfs law, and (5) skill transfer from visual feedback based closed-loop performance to recall based open-loop performance. I will briefly review the SHARK pattern recognition methods and an empirical feasibility study of SHARK, supported by a live demonstration.

Speaker's Bio

Shumin Zhai is a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His work at IBM spans from basic research, invention and evaluation of advanced interfaces, to product innovation and development. He has done research and published about 80 papers on computer input control devices, 3D UI, laws of action, eye-tracking based multi-modal interaction, text writing interfaces, the research and development of the IBM Scrollpoint Mouse, and computer control systems. He holds over a dozen US and many foreign patents. He is currently on the editorial boards of four journals including the ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction and the Human-Computer Interaction journal. He regularly serves on various conference program committees and is currently serving as papers co-chair for CHI 2005. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto.

Host
Brad Myers