Congratulations to Per Ola Kristensson who was recent conferred with the the title of Docent (Honorary Associate Professor) in Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University in Sweden. Per Ola has been in the University of St Andrews since early 2011 but before coming to St Andrews Per Ola 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.
Per Ola’s 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. Per Ola 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).