Alex Olwal, Ph.D.
Research & Engineering Leader / Product Innovation for AI and AR

Human—AI Interaction · Multimodal Interfaces · Augmented Reality · Wearables · Human—Computer Interaction · Accessibility · Interaction Technology · Ubiquitous Computing

Founded and led various teams at Google, including the Interaction Lab; Tech & Society 2024-2025, Augmented Reality 2020-2024, Research 2018-2020, ATAP 2017-2018, Wearables 2015-2017, [x] 2014-2015. Academic research conducted at MIT, Columbia University, University of California, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), and Microsoft Research, with much appreciated collaborators and contributors at the same or other institutions. Also, thank you Stanford University, Rhode Island School of Design and KTH for the opportunity to teach.

Alex Olwal

SilentSpeller
SilentSpeller enables mobile silent texting using a dental retainer with capacitive touch sensors to track tongue movement. Users type by spelling words without voicing. Comparing silent spelling to current practice suggests that SilentSpeller may be a viable alternative for silent mobile text entry.
SilentSpeller: Towards mobile, hands-free, silent speech text entry using electropalatography
Kimura, N., Gemicioglu, T., Womack, J., Zhao, Y., Li, R., Bedri, A., Su, Z., Olwal, A., Rekimoto, J., and Starner
Proceedings of CHI 2022 (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), New Orleans, LA, Apr 19-May 5, 2022, pp. 1-19, Article 288.

CHI 2022
 PDF [23MB]
Mobile, Hands-free, Silent Speech Texting Using SilentSpeller
Kimura, N., Gemicioglu, T., Womack, J., Li, R., Zhao, Y., Bedri, A., Olwal, A., Rekimoto, J., and Starner, T.
CHI 2021 Extended Abstracts (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Virtual Event, May 8-13, 2021, pp. 1-5, Article 178.

CHI 2021
 PDF [16MB]
thumbnails/silentspeller/5.jpg  thumbnails/silentspeller/1.jpg