Per Ola Kristensson

Dr Per Ola Kristensson is a Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the University of St Andrews and cofounder of the SACHI group. He is the second supervisor to Jakub Dostal. He is interested in interdisciplinary research intersecting human-computer interaction (HCI) and the AI and machine learning fields. This includes gesture and touch-screen interaction, intelligent software design tools and interfaces that visualise machine learning and other uncertain reasoning methods.

Before coming to St Andrews he was the Schlumberger Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge and held personal Marie Curie and EPSRC fellowships at the Cavendish and Computer Laboratories at the University of Cambridge. His research has been widely reported in the international press, including The Economist, Die Zeit and BBC World News. In 2005 he won the Best Doctoral Consortium Contribution Award at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a premier publication venue in human-computer interaction. Together with Dr Shumin Zhai he pioneered gesture keyboard technology for touch-screens and co-founded ShapeWriter, Inc. to commercialise this technology in 2007. He was the Director of Engineering of this company (2007-2010) and worked fulltime in Beijing, China in 2007-2008 to set up and manage the engineering office with about ten employees. The company was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc. in 2010. ShapeWriter was selected as the 8th best iPhone application in the world by Time magazine in 2008 and won a Google Android ADC50 developer award the same year. He did his doctoral work at the Institute of Technology at Linköping University, Sweden and at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA (Ph.D. Computer Science 2007).

For more information visit his full website or follow him on twitter @pokristensson.