PhD student Haijun Xia has been named a Microsoft Research PhD Fellow 2018-19. He is supervised by Associate Professor Daniel Wigdor (UTM) in the Dynamic Graphics Project lab.
The Microsoft Research PhD Fellows represent the best and the brightest from North America. The 2018-19 recipients receive two years of tuition and an annual stipend.
Haijun's reserach is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with a focus on creating flexible digital media to augment our creativity.
In the age of digital computing, we strive to communicate with computers in order to leverage their power to augment our human intelligence and creativity. We explore creative ideas by sketching out designs, manipulating models, and conversing with others. The computing power usually comes last, where the rich and dynamic ideas are downsampled to certain supported representations, by clicking commands from the menus or filling in numbers for the properties.
Haijun’s research seeks to empower us to think with computers. He invents new representations of the content, coupled with intuitive interaction techniques, to enable flexible exploration and direct expression of ideas via graphical, gestural, and verbal communication that we are naturally capable of.
Read more about this year's Microsoft PhD Fellowships
Learn more about the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program