Orizzonti in Ingegneria: The Human and Technology Factors in Smartphone Text Input'

Billions of users communicate and search on their smartphones everyday through a modern software interface - the touchscreen keyboard. Developing smarter, more efficient, easy to learn, and fun to use keyboards has presented many fascinating human factors and machine intelligence research and design questions. Mr. Zhai will review and synthesize the progress and open research questions of the past 15 years in text input, focusing on those his colleagues and he have contributed through publications, including the cost–benefit equations of automation and prediction, the power of machine/statistical intelligence, the human performance models fundamental to the design of error-correction algorithms, spatial scaling effect in device sizes and the implications on human–machine labor division, and the challenges of evaluating the longitudinal effects of personalization and adaptation.

Through this research program review, he will illustrate why the combination of machine intelligence and human factors holds the future of human-computer interaction, and information technology at large.

Keywords:

Human-Machine Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Performance, Text Input Methods, Touchscreen User Interfaces, Machine Intelligence, Technology Innovation.