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Shengdong Zhao
Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
MIE Interactive Media Lab
Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) Lab
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canda
Phone: (416) 978-7581
Email: sszhao (at) dgp.toronto.edu

Hi, my name is Shengdong Zhao [Shen]. I am a fourth year Computer Science Ph.D. student at University of Toronto. My supervisor is Prof. Mark Chignell from MIE's Interactive Media Lab. My master degree is from School of Information Management & Systems, University of California at Berkeley. My undergraduate program dual majored in Computer Science and Biology at Linfield College, Oregon.

During the summer of 2006, I interned under Ken Hinckley at Microsoft Research (MSR), Redmond on a pen-based in situ search tool called InkSeine. The research result was submitted to ACM CHI 2007. 

During the summer of 2005, I interned under Maneesh Agrawala and Ken Hinckley at Microsoft Research (MSR), Redmond on gesture-based menu techniques. The research result was published at ACM CHI 2006.

My past working experience includes working as a computer system engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, as a staff engineer at SeeUthere.com, Sillicon Valley, and as an intern at Space Machine Inc.

At University of California, Berkeley, I worked as a Graduate Student Researcher for Professor Robert Wilensky on Multivalent Document of the Digital Library Project. Before joining UofT, I had worked one year as a research associate for Prof. monica schraefel (now at University of Southampton, U.K.).

My research field is HCI (Human Computer Interaction). In general, I am interested in anything related to HCI. In particular, my interests include gesture input, interaction techniques, auditory interface, audio widgets, and information visualization. Currently, I am working on: Here is my cv.

Teaching

No teaching is planned for this year.
Upcoming Activities

December 27th, 2006 to January 25th, 2007

 Visit my family and friends in Shanghai, China.

April 28th to May 3rd, 2007  

CHI 2007, San Jose, USA. 


Publications   (in reverse chronological order)

Refereed (Full) Conference Papers:

  5.  
Patrick Baudisch., Desney Tan, Collomb, M., Daniel Robbins, Ken Hinckley, Maneesh Agrawala, Shengdong Zhao, and Gonzalo Ramos (2006). Phosphor: Explaining Transitions in the User Interface Using Afterglow Effects. Proceedings of UIST 2006 - the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. p. 169-178.
  • Summary: Sometimes users fail to notice a change that just took place on their display. Animated transitions can help, but they force users to wait for the animation to complete. We propose a different approach. Phosphor objects show the outcome of their transition instantly; at the same time they explain their change in retrospect. We present a framework of transition designs for widgets, icons, and objects in drawing programs. We evaluate phosphor objects in two user studies and report significant performance benefits for phosphor objects.

 

4.
Shengdong Zhao, Maneesh Agrawala, Ken Hinckley (2006). Zone and polygon menus: using relative position to increase the breadth of multi-stroke marking menus. Proceedings of CHI 2006 – the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2006. pages 1077-1086. [Acceptance rate: 118/506 or 23%]
  • Summary: Zone and Polygon menus are two new variants of multi-stroke marking menus that consider both the relative position and orientation of strokes. Our menus are designed to increase menu breadth over the 8 item limit of status quo orientation-based marking menus. We also discuss hybrid techniques that may further increase menu breadth and performance.
  • movie (22 MB wma, 720x480, 29.970 fps, 5:02)
  • PPT slides of my talk at CHI 2006.

 

3.
Shengdong Zhao, Michael J. McGuffin, Mark H. Chignell (2005). Elastic hierarchies: combining treemaps and node-link diagrams. Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (InfoVis) 2005. pages 57-64. [Acceptance rate: 31/114 or 27%]
  • Summary: considers hybrid graphical representations that combine node-link and treemap diagrams for the purposes of tree visualization. The concept of elastic representational space is introduced. A theoretical analysis yields a taxonomy of various potential hybrid combinations, and a prototype system is implemented to experiment with these.
  • movie (28 MB avi, DivX 6.0 encoded, 720x480, 29.970 fps, 5:00)
    Although the prototype does support some animated transitions, performance problems during the capturing of the video resulted in these animations not being very apparent in the video.
  • PPT slides of my talk at InfoVis (text transcript of the talk included in the note section of each slide).
  • DGP IRG talk slides on an overview of Tree and Treemap visualizations (2003).
  • Reference entry.

2.
Shengdong Zhao, Ravin Balakrishnan. (2004). Simple vs. compound mark hierarchical marking menus. Proceedings of UIST 2004 – the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. p. 33-42. [Acceptance rate: 36/170 or 21%. Received 5,5,5,5 from all reviewers - the highest review score in UIST 2004.]
  • Summary: simple mark techique (multi-stroke marking menu) is a variant of hierarchical marking menus where items are selected using a series of straight lines, rather than the single "zig-zag" compound mark used in the traditional design. Study shows multi-stroke marking menu increase menu depth, and is faster and more accurate than the traditional compound mark technique while requiring less input space. Before this paper, a single continuous stroke is generally regarded as a better way to perform gestures, but our paper shows that by breaking a complex continuous stroke into simple segments, the performance could be improved.
  • PPT slides of my talk at UIST, please also download the WMA file for a short video inside of the PPT file. And, I recorded the audio for the UIST presentation
  • Reference entry.
 
1.
monica schraefel, Yuxiang Zhu, David Modjeska, Daniel Wigdor, Shengdong Zhao. (2002) Hunter gatherer: interaction support for the creation and management of within-web page collections. Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on World Wide Web. p. 172-181.
  • Summary: Hunter Gatherer is an interface that lets Web users carry out three main tasks: (1) collect components from within Web pages; (2) represent those components in a collection; (3) edit those component collections. Our research shows that while the practice of making collections of content from within Web pages is common, it is not frequent, due in large part to poor interaction support in existing tools. We engaged with users in task analysis as well as iterative design reviews in order to understand the interaction issues that are part of within-Web-page collection making and to design an interaction that would support that process.
  • Reference entry.


Short Papers, Workshop Papers, Posters:

  3.
monica schraefel, Maria Karam, Shengdong Zhao (2003) Listen to the Music: Audio Preview Cues for Exploration of Online Music. Interact 2003, Switzerland. (short paper).
  2.
monica schraefel, Maria Karam, Shengdong Zhao. Audio Preview Cues: Interaction Aides for Exploration of Online Music and Beyond. HCI International 2003. (poster)
  1.
monica schraefel, Maria Karam, Shengdong Zhao. Interaction design for user-determined, adaptable domain exploration in hypermedia AH2003: Workshop on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. (workshop paper)

Other Projects

  4.
OCT2
OCT2 is a new and improved version of the original OCT system (software to manage the conference paper submission and reviewing process) deveveloped by David Gering. OCT2 was used for the CVPR 2003 paper submission and review process and was co-developed by Shengdong Zhao and Kyros Kutulakos. (application)
3.
DInfoBuilder: (Dynamic Information Builder)
DInfoBuilder builds the next generation information management software. It enables efficient, simple development, maintenance, and transformation of information systems. DInfoBuilder allows non-technical personnel to quickly build a dynamic e-commerce application on the web and wireless platforms. The resulting applications will be platform independent, device independent, database independent. DInfoBuilder will greatly improve the ways information are organized, presented, interoperated, and interacted. (SIMS master project)
2.
Multivalent Browser:
I built the first version of PDF media adapter by porting xPDF's code to Java.
This project has evolved to an open source software application. (code library)
1.
DOE2000 Electronic Notebook:
I worked as a computer system engineer in Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with
Dr. Sonia Sachs on this project for one year. (application)

Personal Information

Shen's Blog

Miscellaneous

Place to find useful word templates (include templates for CV and thesis).

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