Siyou Pei, Pradyumna Chari, Xue Wang, Xiaoying Yang, Achuta Kadambi, Yang Zhang (UIST 2022)
Best Demo Honorable Mention
We present ForceSight, a non-contact force sensing approach using laser speckle imaging. Our key observation is that object surfaces deform in the presence of force. This deformation, though very minute, manifests as observable and discernible laser speckle shifts, which we leverage to sense the applied force. To investigate the feasibility of our approach, we conducted studies on a wide variety of materials. We also demonstrated the applicability with several example applications.
Siyou Pei, Alexander Chen, Jaewook Lee, Yang Zhang (CHI 2022)
Best Paper Honorable Mention
A new interaction technique that lets users' hands become virtual objects by imitating the objects themselves. For example, a thumbs-up hand pose is used to mimic a joystick. We created a wide array of interaction designs around this idea to demonstrate its applicability in object retrieval and interactive control tasks. Collectively, we call these interaction designs Hand Interfaces.
Swapnil Sayan Saha, Mr. Sandeep Singh Sandha, Siyou Pei, Vivek Jain, Mr. Ziqi Wang, Yuchen Li, Ankur Sarker, Prof. Mani Srivastava (IMWUT 2021)
AURITUS is an extendable and open-source optimization toolkit designed to enhance and replicate earable applications. AURITUS handles data collection, pre-processing, and labeling tasks using graphical tools and provides a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) optimizer and TinyML interface to develop lightweight and real-time machine-learning models for activity detection and filters for head-pose tracking.
 
Bo-Jhang Ho, Bharathan Balaji, Mehmet Koseoglu, Sandeep Sandha, Siyou Pei, Mani Srivastava (ICML 2021 Workshop on Human in the Loop Learning)
Human attention is a scarce resource in modern computing. Quick Question explores use of reinforcement learning (RL) to schedule microtasks while minimizing user annoyance and compare its performance with supervised learning. We model the problem as a Markov decision process and use Advantage Actor Critic algorithm to identify interruptible moments.
 Nov 2022: Received UIST Best Demo Honorable Mention Award for ForceSight.
Oct 2022: Presented ForceSight at UIST '22, Bend, OR.
Oct 2022: Reviewed CHI 2023 Papers.
August 2022: Passed the Oral Qualifying Examination at Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
May 2022: Reviewed UIST 2022 Papers.
May 2022: Presented Hand Interfaces at CHI '22, New Orleans, LA.
April 2022: Received CHI Honorable Mention Award for Hand Interfaces.
April 2022: Reviewed CHI 2022 Late-Breaking Work.
Mar 2022: Passed the Preliminary Exam at Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
Dec 2021: Turned in MS thesis and obtained the MS degree.
Nov 2021: Reviewed CHI 2022 Papers.
Feb 2021: Reviewed CHI 2021 Late-Breaking Work.
Sept 2019: Started MS-Ph.D. program at University of California, Los Angeles.