With the goal of increasing the department’s research and course offerings in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI), Xiaojun Bi has joined the Department of Computer Science as Assistant Professor. His research focus on building interactive systems, designing interaction techniques, and studying fundamental issues of user interface design on mobile devices.
Xiaojun has also contributed many innovations in this particular field of computer science. He has developed a number of techniques for mobile text entry systems, pen and touch based interactive systems, and large display interaction. His recent work, specifically in keyboard correction and completion algorithms, bimanual gesture typing, and personalizing language models for text entry, has been integrated into the Android operating system keyboard, which has over 100 million daily users. He also created the keyboard evaluation tool “Octopus” that enables keyboard developers to efficiently measure and inspect algorithmic changes without conducting user studies.
The Department of Computer Science’s newest faculty member holds 11 patents, with nine more currently pending. He has authored over twenty publications in prominent HCI journals, and his research papers have been recognized at ACM CHI, the flagship conference of this area of study. His paper Studying the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff of Finger Touch Input won the Google 2013 Influential Paper Award.
Early in his educational career, Bi was recognized for his work and passion for problem-solving. As a high school student in China, he won the first place in the Chinese National Mathematical Olympiad in his home province. As a result, he was recruited by Tsinghua University (China), with the national college entrance exam waived. While there, he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees before moving on to the University of Toronto to earn his PhD in computer science. Prior to joining Stony Brook University, he was a research scientist for Google, working out of Mountain View, California.
On behalf of everyone in the Department of Computer Science, and the entire campus community: Welcome to Stony Brook, Xiaojun!
By Michael Curatola