Hemant Surale, PhD

Hemant is an HCI+AI researcher who builds and evaluates human-centered systems for mixed reality, wearable sensing, and multimodal input. His work sits at the intersection of machine learning, perceptual modeling, and human factors, usually involving things people wear on their wrists, hands, or face.

He has held senior research roles at Meta, Huawei, Snap, Microsoft Research, Google/North, and NetApp, working on problems like real-time expertise tracking with wearable sensors, gaze-based interaction, haptic feedback for XR productivity, and multi-device fluid interfaces. Earlier in his career, he shipped database features at Oracle and optimized distributed storage systems. Over the years, his work has touched database internals, file systems, hardware prototyping, wearable devices, high-performance systems, and more recently, large language models.

He got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, where his thesis focused on barehand mode-switching in touch and mid-air interfaces. He was advised by Daniel Vogel, Mark Hancock, and Edward Lank. He received the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship three times, two Best Paper Honorable Mentions at CHI and ISS, a CS Achievement Award, and a Snap Research Fellowship (one of 11 worldwide). He has published extensively at CHI, UIST, and ISMAR, and holds multiple patents in input space.