One of Dr. Zhai’s main HCI research threads is Fitts’ law type of human performance models. From 1996, Dr. Zhai, alongside his colleagues, has pursued research on “Laws of Action” that attempted to carry the spirit of Fitts’ law forward. In the HCI context, Fitts’ law can be considered the “Law of Pointing”, while they believe there are other robust human performance regularities in action. The two new classes of action relevant to user interface design and evaluation that they have explored are crossing and steering.

From 2011 till present, Dr. Zhai has been working at Google as a Principal Scientist, where he leads and directs research, design, and development of human-device input methods and haptics systems. Specifically, he has led research and design of Google’s keyboard products, Pixel phone haptics, and novel Google Assistant invocation methods. Notably, Dr. Zhai led the design of Active Edge, a headline feature of Google Pixel 2, which enables the user to reach Google Assistant faster and more intuitively using a gentle device squeeze rather than the touch screen.

From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Zhai was also the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. At the time he had been deeply involved in both the conference side and the journal side of publishing HCI research as an author, reviewer, editor, committee member, and papers chair.

In 2005, he developed and studied an experimental system, RealTourist, with Pernilla Qvarfordt and David Beymer. RealTourist lets a user to plan a conference trip with the help of a remote tourist consultant who could view the tourist’s eye-gaze superimposed onto a shared map. Data collected from the experiment were analyzed in conjunction with literature review on speech and eye-gaze patterns. This inspective, exploratory research identified various functions of gaze-overlay on shared spatial material including: accurate and direct display of partner’s eye-gaze, implicit deictic referencing, interest detection, common focus and topic switching, increased redundancy and ambiguity reduction, and an increase of assurance, confidence, and understanding. This study identified patterns that can serve as a basis for designing multimodal human-computer dialogue systems with eye-gaze locus as a contributing channel, and investigated how computer-mediated communication can be supported by the display of the partner’s eye-gaze.

In 2005 and 2006, Dr. Zhai and his colleague Min Yin at IBM Almaden Research Center published two papers about this project. Their study shows that FonePal enables easier navigation of IVR phone tree, higher navigation speed, less routing error and greater satisfaction. FonePal can also seamlessly bridge the caller to a searchable web knowledge base, promoting relevant self-help and reducing call center operation cost.

In 2003, Dr. Zhai and Per Ola Kristensson proposed a method of speed-writing for pen-based computing, SHARK (shorthand aided rapid keyboarding), which augments stylus keyboarding with shorthand gesturing. SHARK defines a shorthand symbol for each word according to its movement pattern on an optimized stylus keyboard. In 2004, they presented SHARK that increased recognition accuracy and relaxed precision requirements by using the shape and location of gestures in addition to context based language models. In doing so, Dr. Zhai and Kristensson delivered a paradigm of touch screen gesture typing as an efficient method for text entry that has continued to drive the development of mobile text entry across the industry. One of the most important rationales of gesture keyboards is facilitating transition from primarily visual-guidance drive letter-to-letter tracing to memory-recall driven gesturing. By releasing the first word-gesture keyboard in 2004 through IBM AlphaWorks and a top ranked iPhone app called ShapeWriter WritingPad in 2008, Dr. Zhai and his colleagues were able to facilitate this transition and brought the invention from the laboratory to real world users.

From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Zhai was a visiting adjunct professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University, where he also supervised graduate research.

In 1999, he worked together with his colleagues (Carlos Morimoto and Steven Ihde) at IBM Almaden Research Center and published a paper Manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing. This work explored a new direction in utilizing eye gaze for computer input, showing that the MAGIC pointing techniques might offer many advantages, including less physical effort and fatigue than traditional manual pointing, greater accuracy and naturalness than traditional gaze pointing, and possibly faster speed than manual pointing.

From 1996 to 2011, he worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center. In January 2007, he originated and led the SHARK/ShapeWriter project at IBM Research and a start-up company that pioneered the touchscreen word-gesture keyboard paradigm, filing the first patents of this paradigm, publishing the first generation of scientific papers. In 2010, ShapeWriter was acquired by Nuance Communications, and taken off the market. During his tenure at IBM, Dr. Zhai also worked with a team of engineers from IBM and IBM vendors to bring the ScrollPoint mouse from research to market, and received a CES award and millions of users.

He was a consultant at Autodesk in 1995 before joining IBM Almaden Research Center in 1996.

Born in Harbin, China in 1961, Dr. Zhai received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1982, and his master’s degree in Computer Science in 1984 from Xidian University. After that, he served on the faculty of the Northwest Institute of Telecommunication Engineering (now Xidian University) in Xi’an, China where he taught and conducted research in computer control systems until 1989. In 1995, received his PhD degree in Human Factors Engineering at the University of Toronto.