Hemant Surale, PhD

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Hemant is an HCI+AI Scientist. His main research interests include Mixed Reality Interfaces (MR), Wearable Computing (Rings and Wristbands), Input Interactions (Gestural interfaces), and Applied AI (Computer Vision).

He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He was advised by Daniel Vogel, Mark Hancock, and Edward Lank. He has been awarded with the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship three time, IDSA, CS achievement, and the Snap Research Fellowship.

He led/leading impactful research at Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Google/North, and NetApp R&D departments bridging theory and practice. He is passionate about maximizing productivity through user interface design, AI-integrated development, and empirical evaluation, particularly emphasizing fundamental concepts like modes and mode-switching to establish practical design principles for diverse MR applications.

news

Jan 18, 2025	Happy to announce that Shwetha’s paper on multimodal voice and gesture interaction techniques has been conditionally accepted at CHI’25!!
Aug 24, 2024	Our interns, Shwetha, Ruei-Che, and Judy submitted menuscripts to CHI’25.
May 28, 2024	Two of our intern papers on text-entry topic got conditionally accepted at ISMAR’24.
Jan 26, 2024	Our intern Junxiao (Shawn) is off to start an assistant professor position at the University of Bristol, UK. Congrats!!

selected publications

Gesture and Audio-Haptic Guidance Techniques to Direct Conversations with Intelligent Voice Interfaces

Shwetha Rajaram, Hemant Bhaskar Surale, Codie McConkey, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{rajaram2025gesturellm,
  title = {Gesture and Audio-Haptic Guidance Techniques to Direct Conversations with Intelligent Voice Interfaces},
  author = {Rajaram, Shwetha and Surale, Hemant Bhaskar and McConkey, Codie and Rognon, Carine and Mehta, Hrim and Glueck, Michael and Collins, Christopher},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  pages = {1--20},
  year = {2025},
}

Gesture2Text: A Generalizable Decoder for Word-Gesture Keyboards in XR Through Trajectory Coarse Discretization and Pre-training

Junxiao Shen, Khadija Khaldi, Enmin Zhou, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{shen2024Gesture2Text,
  author = {Shen, Junxiao and Khaldi, Khadija and Zhou, Enmin and Surale, Hemant Bhaskar and Karlson, Amy},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  pages = {1--13},
  year = {2024},
}