Haijun
Xia,
PhD
candidate
Department
of
Computer
Science,
University
of
Toronto
From the dawn of computing, we have been striving to leverage computation to augment our productivity and creativity. While interactive technologies have become increasingly powerful, employing computation for creativity support and problem solving is still a rigid and laborious process. As a Human-Computer Interaction researcher, I seek to enable users to directly and flexibly express their intentions to computers, effectively integrating computation into their thinking processes.
My research takes a fundamental approach, where I have been focusing on inventing new representations and primitives of the graphical user interfaces that better match our mental processes. Coupled with the afforded interaction techniques, I will demonstrate how they lead to novel user interface paradigms, which allow us to directly express our intentions to computation and quickly perform interactions which were previously tedious, or even impossible.
Bio: Haijun Xia is a Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Daniel Wigdor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. He is an Adobe PhD Fellow, a Microsoft Research PhD Fellow, and has received four Best Paper Award and Nomination at premier venues in Human-Computer Interaction.
His research in HCI focuses on augmenting our productivity and creativity through novel representations and interaction techniques. He approaches this goal through the development of the Human-Centered Interaction Language. Its cornerstone is the Human-Centered Representation, which directly reflects and dynamically adapts to our mental processes, as well as affords Human-Centered Articulation through which we can fluidly express our thoughts to digital devices via our natural capabilities such as gestures and voice.