Keith Vertanen


Hello and welcome! I'm currently the Dave House Associate Professor of Computing at the Department of Computer Science at Michigan Tech.

I specialize in designing intelligent interactive systems that leverage uncertain input technologies. A particular focus of my research is on systems that enhance the capabilities of users with permanent or situationally-induced disabilities. My broader interests include human-computer interaction (HCI), speech and language processing, mobile interfaces, and crowdsourcing.

What's new:

  • January 2023 – We had three papers accepted at IUI 2023! PhD student Dylan Gaines will present on his new ambiguous eye-free input method FlexType. We have an open science paper on our new dataset of noisy QWERTY typing. Finally, we have a study about the dwell-free gaze keyboard we created for Tobii Dynavox.
  • December 2022 – Are you interested how to design user interfaces or model users? Check out the new book Bayesian Methods for Interaction and Design. PhD student Dylan Gaines was the lead author on our chapter on Statistical Keyboard Decoding.
  • August 2022 – We will be presenting three workshop papers at the MobileHCI 2022 workshop TEXT2030. Undergraduate Josh Reynolds will present his first paper that compares different mixed reality keyboard locations. PhD student Dylan Gaines will present a new text entry phrase set with difficulty ratings. We will also present a study by former PhD student Jiban Adhikary and undergraduate Max Isom on the impact of different numbers of predictions on a dwell keyboard.
  • July 2022 – We had two papers accepted in the posters track at ASSETS 2022! Congrats to graduate student Sadia Norwin for her paper on how motor-impaired programmers use speech recognition. Congrats to graduate student Ricardo Gonzalez Penuela (Cornell) for his paper on how people with visual-impairments take selfies.
  • May 2022 – Our demo of Nomon was selected as runner-up for best demo at CHI 2022!
  • April 2022 – Our paper on Nomon, an interface for single-switch Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) users, will appear at CHI 2022 as a full paper and as a demo paper. Come see us at CHI interactivty on Monday night, or visit https://nomon.app/demo. Our talk is at 9:15 on Tuesday morning, see the CHI program. You can also watch a pre-recorded video. Congrats to graduate student Nicholas Bonaker (MIT) on his first CHI paper!
  • July 2021 – I'm giving a 3-hour master class on Language Modeling and Predictive AAC at ISAAC Connect. My session is Monday August 9th starting at 9am Eastern. Hope to (virtually) see you there! [Talk slides]
  • May 2021 – We had our paper on abbreviated sentence input accepted at ACL-IJCNLP 2021.
  • April 2021 – Do you use Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC)? If so, we are looking for volunteers to donate sentences from their AAC history. See our study details.
  • Older news

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