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Last updated on March 24, 2021

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February 23, 2025 We are pleased to host Dr. Francisco R. Ortega from Colorado State University, who will deliver an invited talk at the Graduate Seminar titled "Design and Application of Extended Reality Notifications" on Friday, February 28, 2025, at 12:00 PM in COB1-263. After the talk, Dr. Ortega will visit our lab and interact with students. We look forward to welcoming him.
November 11, 2024 Meghna Mehta, Senior UX Designer, Striim, will be giving a virtual guest lecture titled "Transforming Requirements into Designs for Enterprise Applications" in my Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction class on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. The Zoom link will be provided upon request.
October 7, 2024 Dr. Mayra Donaji Barrera-Machuca will be giving a virtual guest lecture titled "Using Eye-Gaze for Design and Art in VR" in my Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction class on Wednesday, November 13, 2024. The Zoom link will be provided upon request.
October 7, 2024 Dr. Jingchao Fang will be giving a virtual guest lecture titled "Design Interactive Systems for Online Learning and Teaching" in my Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction class on Monday, October 28, 2024. The Zoom link will be provided upon request.
October 7, 2024 Dr. Tamanna Motahar will be giving a virtual guest lecture titled "Expanding Personal Informatics Research for People with Severe Motor Disabilities" in my Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction class on Monday, October 14, 2024. The Zoom link will be provided upon request.
April 30, 2024 I am thrilled to announce that I have been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure, effective July 1. The journey from joining the campus to this point has been challenging, particularly with the pandemic, the lack of lab space in the first five years, and family obligations. Despite these obstacles, I am proud that the committee recognized the success and resilience of the lab.
January 19, 2024 Pleased to share that we have two papers conditionally accepted to ACM CHI 2024. The first introduces a real-time silent speech recognizer for mobile devices, the second studies the impact of pleasant scents on text entry performance.
October 7, 2023 Professor Antti Oulasvirta (Aalto University, Finland) will be visiting our lab on Friday, October 13, 2023. He will be presenting a lecture titled "HCI's Second Icarus Moment" and will also take the opportunity to interact with our lab members.

Not updated between March 24, 2021 and October 7, 2023

May 25, 2021 PhD students Laxmi Pandey and Gulnar Rakhmetulla have been awarded the prestigious Fred and Mitzie Ruiz Fellowship for contributing to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education through their academic career and community service. Each will receive $1,000 for travel and student research.
May 19, 2021 Our paper "SwipeRing: Gesture Typing on Smartwatches Using a Segmented Qwerty Around the Bezel" received the Michael A. J. Sweeney Best Student Paper Award at the 47th Graphics Interface Conference (GI 2021). The paper presents a ring-shaped Qwerty-like keyboard optimized for skill transfer between devices. PhD student Gulnar Rakhmetulla will present the work.
May 5, 2021 PhD student Tafadzwa Joseph Dube received a Graduate Student Opportunity Program (GSOP) Fellowship 2021-2022 ($45,133) for his work on freehand text entry in virtual and mixed reality. With this we have two consecutive GSOP winners. Last year, PhD student Gulnar Rakhmetulla received the fellowship for her work on input methods for low vision and blind people. Only two fellowships are awarded each year.
March 23, 2021 Dr. Rachel Ryskin, Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Merced will give an invited talk on "Human Language Processing is Adapted to Noise" via Zoom on March 25. 2021 at 11:00 am. Details about the event can be found here.
March 18, 2021 UC Merced Newsroom and the Regents of the University of California published an article on our CHI 2021 papers presenting an improved digital lip reader combined with an independent silent speech and speech recognition repair model, and a social study on the acceptability of lip reader as an input method.
December 12, 2020 Two papers got accepted to CHI 2021. Both with PhD student Laxmi Pandey. The first presents LipType, a lip reader improved with a standalone repair model that also improves speech recognition models. The second paper conducts multiple user studies to evaluate the social acceptability of lip reading as an input method. Both papers conducted remote studies due to COVID-19.
December 3, 2020 PhD student Laxmi Pandey will work as a Research Intern at Facebook during the summer.
September 16, 2020 PhD student Laxmi Pandey received the 2020-2021 Hatano Cognitive Development Research Fellowship ($1,000) for her work on accessible text entry.
July 3, 2020 PhD student Gulnar Rakhmetulla received a Graduate Student Opportunity Program (GSOP) Fellowship 2020-2021 ($45,000) for her work on novel input methods for blind people and ultrasmall devices. Only two fellowships are awarded each year.
May 8, 2020 I have been awarded a Hellman Fellows Award ($50,000) for the project "Enabling Motor Impaired People to Input Text on Mobile and Wearable Devices" UC Merced Newsroom.
April 9, 2020 UC Merced Newsroom, Mariposa Gazette, and IT Media News, Japan published stories covering our work on a novel chorded keyboard for sighted, low vision, and blind mobile users (CHI 2020) and a deep learning powered predictive system for number entry (CHIIR 2020).
February 24, 2020 Congressman Jim Costa visited our lab today. We prepared some demonstrations for him, he then tried some of the technologies developed in the lab firsthand. He asked many interesting questions about the projects and shared his experience with students. We thank the Congressman for his support.
February 13, 2020 Received a Senate Faculty Research Grant for the project "Reducing the Interaction Ambiguity of Smartphones".
January 15, 2020 Met with Reps. Jim Costa and Jerry McNerney in DC. We discussed a range of topics, including security and privacy, open access to data, regulation of artificial intelligence, consideration for human factors in applications, accessibility, computer science education, and the US immigration policy.
January 13, 2020 PhD student Laxmi Pandey has been awarded an ACM SIGIR Student Travel Grant and an ACM-W scholarship for attendance at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR).
July 14, 2019 Dr. Orit Shaer (Wellesley College) is visiting us on November 5. 2019. During her visit she will meet with our students and deliver an invited talk. Details about her visit will be posted here.
July 1, 2019 Satvik Kulshreshtha will defend his MS thesis titled "A Tap-Based Back-of-Device Mobile Users Authentication System" on Friday, July 7, 2019 at 2:00 PM in SE2 290. All are invited.
May 23, 2019 I am on the Program Committee for the 14th ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2019).
May 3, 2018 HCI Group alumnus Anna-Maria Gueorguieva has accepted an offer of admission to UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
April 14, 2018 My co-investigators and I received the Michael A. J. Sweeney Award for the best student paper at the 45th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction (GI 2019), May 28–31, 2019, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The paper "WiseType: A Tablet Keyboard with Color-Coded Visualization and Various Editing Options for Error Correction" presents a novel virtual keyboard that offers both immediate and delayed feedback on language quality through autocorrection, prediction, and grammar checking to increase writing speed, accuracy, and quality. UC Merced Newsroom
March 28, 2018 Two papers, one on graphical feedback through low-resolution (LED) display and another on a comparative evaluation of touch and pen gestures on a vertical large display got accepted to the 8th ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 2019). MS student Yusuke Niiro co-authored the second paper.
March 14, 2019 HCI Group will host Dr. Mahima Agumbe Suresh from San Jose State University, CA on April 12, 2019. During her visit she will deliver a guest lecture to the EECS 255 class on "Visualizing Differences in Process Variants". Details about her visit here.
January 10, 2019 HCI Group will host Dr. Scott MacKenzie from York University, Canada on February 22, 2019. During his visit he will give a talk on "Analytics for Text Entry Methods and Research" and a guest lecture to the EECS 255 class on "Fitts' Law"". Details about his visit here.
January 10, 2019 HCI Group will host Dr. Wolfgang Stuerzlinger from Simon Fraser University, Canada on February 8, 2019. During his visit he will give a talk on "Towards Better User Interfaces for 3D" and a guest lecture to the EECS 255 class on how EEG and context information can automatically classify auto-correction errors in predictive text entry. Details about his visit here.
January 10, 2019 HCI Group will host Benjamin Tag from Keio University, Japan on January 25, 2019. Details about his visit ‪here.
November 30, 2018 We hosted Dr. LouAnne Boyd today. In her inspiring talk titled "Designing Alternative Sensory Channels: Visualizing Nonverbal Communication through AR and VR Systems for People with Autism" she discussed the design and development of novel AR/VR systems for providing neurodiverse children with real-time visualizations of prosody and proximity to support social skills, as well as the children's and their parents' feedback highlighting issues of usability, learnability, and comfortability of the proposed systems.
November 26, 2018 Facebook has announced the winners of the Facebook Global Literacy & Accessibility Challenge Research Awards today. Congratulations to the four winners. My proposal with Tamanna Motahar is one of the six runners-up.
October 22, 2018 STEP Intern Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, a senior at El Capitan High School Merced, California, presented a poster on her internship project, "Enabling Input on Tiny/Headless Systems Using Morse Code" at Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Machines Open House.
September 28, 2018 We hosted Dr. Hao-Chuan Wang today. In his talk titled "Augmenting Collaborations with Social Computing Interaction Designs of Communication Channels", he discussed the design of digital communication channels that accommodate group collaboration. Special thanks for his comments and feedback on our current projects.
September 7, 2018 We hosted Dr. Shijia Pan today. In her talk titled "Indoor Human Information Acquisition from Physical Vibrations", she discussed how physical vibrations can be sensed and interpreted using computer technologies, and can be used to address real-world problems.
August 4, 2018 KYOS 1480 AM Community Conversations Radio Show host Roger Wood interviewed STEP Intern Anna-Maria Gueorguieva (El Capitan High School, Merced) on her experience working at the Human-Computer Interaction Group. Audio
June 21, 2018 We will host Dr. Vera Liao on June 29, 2018. During her visit, she will give a talk on "Towards Adaptive Conversational Agents", exclusive to the Human-Computer interaction Group. Visit this page for details.
June 6, 2018 Had a great time at Grameenphone, Bangladesh. Gave an invited talk on "Bridging the Gap Between Research and Design", followed by an engaging Q&A session and one-on-one discussions. Thanks to the Service Design & UX team, particularly Moin Bhuiyan, for inviting me, and the HR team, particularly Simin Chowdhury, for organizing the event.
May 31, 2018 I had a great time teaching and participating in the ACM SIGCHI Summer School on Research Methods and Approaches to Text Entry and Other Interaction Techniques at IIT Bombay. I learned a lot from the other guest lecturers, organizers, and the attendees. I was particularly impressed by the attendees, a mixture of industry and academic researchers and both graduate and undergraduate students, their enthusiasm and strive to better themselves as researchers. It was a privilege to learn about their research and career goals. Thanks to Dr. Anirudha Joshi, Manjiri Joshi, and Sanjay Ghosh for organizing this amazing summer school. Special thanks to Kanika Tuteja for sharing this picture.
April 10, 2018 I am on the Program Committee for the 13th ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2018).
April 5, 2018 Received a Research Grant for the project "Miniature Predictive Keyboards to Enable Eyes-free Text Entry on/with Smartwatches" through the Academic Senate Faculty Research Grants Program at UC Merced. Post
March 1, 2018 I am co-organizing the ‪MobileHCI 2018 Workshop on "Socio-Technical Aspects of Text Entry". To participate, submit a short position statement outlining your background, past work, future plans, and suggesting a use-case you would like to explore during the workshop. Alternatively, you could submit a technical paper for possible inclusion in the workshop program. Please visit our Webpage for more information.
February 20, 2018 I will give a series of lectures at the ACM SIGCHI Summer School on "Research Methods and Approaches to Text Entry and Other Interaction Techniques" in IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India from May 21-25, 2018. Other guest lecturers of the school are Drs. Per Ola Kristensson, Mark Dunlop, and Keith Vertanen.
The school is open to researchers and students from both industry and academia. ACM SIGCHI will sponsor the registration, travel, and lodging for multiple student participants. Visit this page for more information.
January 15, 2018 WebTEM: A Web Application to Record Text Entry Metrics 2.0 is now live! You can access it via http://webtem.site. This version improves the look-and-feel, includes new performance metrics and experimental conditions, and most excitingly, supports remote/in-the-wild user studies. See the Update Log for other exciting changes. Email me to report bugs, request new feature, or for access to an older version.
January 8, 2018 I am on the Program Committee for the ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for Television and Online Video (TVX 2018).
January 2, 2018 I am on the Program Committee for the 20th ACM International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2018).
December 26, 2017 Invitation to join my newly designed graduate course (4 Units) EECS 255: Advanced Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) is out.
December 26, 2017 Pleased to receive (multiple) special recognition for excellent review for the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2018.
December 23, 2017 Happy to welcome Gulnar Rakhmetulla as a new PhD student to our group. She has two Master's, one in Technical Science from International IT University, Kazakhstan and another in Advanced Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield, UK. As a member of the group, she will primarily work on text entry techniques.
December 12, 2017 I am teaching a newly design graduate course EECS 255: Advanced Human-Computer Interaction this Spring.
September 18, 2017 Happy to welcome Chelsea Sun, a recent graduate from Georgia Tech (Master's in Human-Computer Interaction) to my research group. During her tenure as an Assistant Specialist, she will investigate various social networking platforms.
August 11, 2017 I am pleased to be one of the seven recipients of this year's IEEE SMC Young Professionals Travel Grant.
July 2, 2017 An extended abstract on the results of a pilot study evaluating "Paper Ladder: A Rating Scale to Collect Children's Opinion in User Studies" got accepted to the 19th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2017). Visit this Webpage for more information on the extended abstract and to download the Paper Ladder.
May 25, 2017 Two full-papers, one on the "Effects of Different Types of Correctness Feedback on Children's Performance with a Mobile Math App" and another "Mobile Text Entry Challenges Among Low-Income Users in a Developing Country" got accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2017).
May 15, 2017 Pleased to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced, starting July 1, 2017.
April 18, 2017 I am on the Program Committee for the 12th ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2017). Do consider submitting your work. Please visit the conference Webpage for more information.
April 7, 2017 A full-paper on "Usability of Different Types of Commercial Selfie Sticks" got accepted to the 19th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2017).
December 10, 2016 I am co-organizing the ‪‎CHI 2017‬ workshop on "Ubiquitous Text Interaction". To participate, submit a short position statement outlining your background, past work, future plans, and suggesting a use-case you would like to explore during the workshop. Alternatively, you could submit a technical paper for possible inclusion in the workshop program. Please visit our Webpage for more information.
September 9, 2016 Two extended abstracts, one on a "Color-Coded Autocorrection Technique for Children" and another on "WebTEM, a Web Application to Record Text Entry Metrics", got accepted to the 12th ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2016)‬.
August 25, 2016 A full-paper on "Active Pathways: A Tangible-Tabletop System for Collaborative Modeling in Systems Biology" got accepted to the 12th ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2016)‬.
August 8, 2016 I am on the Workshop Program Committee for the Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2017).
August 5, 2016 A patent on "Multi-Gesture Security Code Entry", co-invented with Michel Pahud, Bill Buxton, and Ken Hinckley, filed by Microsoft Corporation, got approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office (#14/599,966).
July 19, 2016 I am on the Program Committee for the 18th Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC 2017).
June 24, 2016 I am chairing the "Mobile Input" session at the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2016) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
February 18, 2016 Our paper "Sparse Tangibles: Collaborative Exploration of Gene Networks Using Active Tangibles & Interactive Tabletops" appeared on the "Omroep Brabant" television. This report includes a video.
February 8, 2016 A LBW paper on "A Phrase Set for Bengali Text Entry Evaluations Based on Actual Text Messages" got accepted to the 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (‪‎CHI 2016)‬. Webpage
December 14, 2015 A full-paper on the "Evaluation of a Smart-Restorable Backspace Technique to Facilitate Text Entry Error Correction" got accepted to the 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016).
November 29, 2015 I am co-organizing the ‪TEI 2016‬ workshop on "Developing Responsive and Interactive Environments with the ROSS Toolkit". Do consider submitting a position paper. Webpage
November 26, 2015 I am co-organizing the ‪‎CHI 2016‬ workshop on "Inviscid Text Entry and Beyond". Do consider submitting a position paper. Webpage
November 4, 2015 The Faculty of Communication & Design (FCAD) at Ryerson University, Canada highlighted our project "Sparse Tangibles: Collaborative Exploration of Gene Networks Using Active Tangibles and Interactive Tabletops" at the inaugural Rubix Showcase.