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About

ABOUT

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath.

 

My research focuses on enabling interaction with computers in challenging situations. Specifically, while users' hands are encumbered holding everyday objects. This always-available input has a wide range of applications, from controlling mobile devices when on the move to controlling systems in healthcare contexts. To build an entire stack of such novel input experiences, my work employs: 
 

  • interaction design by understanding user preferences,

  • creation and empirical analysis of large-scale datasets,

  • machine learning models for real-time recognition.

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I recently received my Ph.D. from the Human-Computer Interaction group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, advised by Prof. Jürgen Steimle. I completed my masters at the Media Interaction Lab, advised by Prof. Michael Haller.

 

I have also worked at Meta Reality Labs with Stephanie Santosa and Prof. Tovi Grossman. Previously, I worked with Prof. Daniel Ashbrook at the University of Copenhagen and with Prof. Ellen Yi-Luen Do at the National University of Singapore. I have also been fortunate to work with the Parkinson's Research Group at the UBC Hospital in Vancouver, and contributed to Open-source communities (Mozilla and Python). 

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E-mail
Notable Publications

NOTABLE PUBLICATIONS

Note about publication venues: In my area of research, ACM CHI and UIST are the top-most and highly impactful venues (Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic both rank CHI as the #1 venue). The review process in these venues is multi-stage and very selective for each publication, involving 4-6 international subject-matter experts.

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SparseIMU: 
Computational Design of Sparse IMU Layouts for Sensing Fine-Grained Finger Microgestures

Accepted at ACM TOCHI

Adwait Sharma, Christina Salchow-Hömmen, Vimal S. Mollyn, Aditya S. Nittala, Michael A. Hedderich, Marion Koelle, Thomas Seel, Jürgen Steimle

Computational design tool to solve a multi-factorial problem of recognizing always-available input with minimal sensors.

Email me for preprint

SoloFinger:
Robust Microgestures while Grasping Everyday Objects
 

In Proc. of ACM CHI

Adwait Sharma, Michael A. Hedderich, Divyanshu Bhardwaj, Bruno Fruchard, Jess McIntosh, Aditya S. Nittala, Dietrich Klakow, Daniel Ashbrook, Jürgen Steimle

Easy and rapid-to-perform gestures, which are resilient to false activations.

Grasping Microgestures:
Eliciting Single-hand Microgestures for Handheld Objects
 

In Proc. of ACM CHI

Adwait Sharma, Joan Sol Roo, Jürgen Steimle

Analysis of over 2,400 user-generated microgestures while holding an everyday object. 

SmartSleeve:
Real-time Sensing of Surface and Deformation Gestures on Flexible, Interactive Textiles, using a Hybrid Gesture Detection Pipeline

In Proc. of ACM UIST

Patrick Parzer, Adwait Sharma, Anita Vogl, Jürgen Steimle, Alex Olwal, Michael Haller

Wearable textile that can detect 22 surface and deformation gestures in real-time.

DATASETS

From my experience with open-source communities, I strive to release datasets for future research. 

These datasets can be extremely large. Please refer to the respective publication or email me for more details.

SoloFinger


First dataset of single-finger movements with multiple fingers and on 36 everyday actions. In particular, these include a wide variety of real-world objects and grasps.
 

  • OptiTrack:

Apparatus: 11 infrared OptiTrack cameras
Data: Manually labeled 5,530 gesture trials (880K frames)

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  • VR Glove:

Apparatus: Noitom® Hi5 VR Glove
Data: Manually labeled 5,840 trials 
 

[Download] Compressed Zip file with OptiTrack and VR Glove Dataset

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SparseIMU


Using IMUs placed on the hand, I captured finger-microgestures and hand-manipulations in freehand and while holding 12 objects. 

 

Apparatus: 17 Synchronized IMUs
Data: Manually labeled 13,860 trials, resulting in a total of 3.4M frames.
 

[Code and Data] (Coming Soon)

Datasets

TEACHING

As a Teaching Assistant, I have designed and co-organized the following courses with Prof. Jürgen Steimle:

  • Human-Computer Interaction Core Lecture 2021: bachelors or masters

  • Physical Computing 2021: bachelors or masters

  • Interactive Computing with Augmented and Virtual Reality 2019: bachelors or masters

  • Programming for Engineers 2018: bachelors or masters

Teaching

VOLUNTEERING

  • Committee Member: CHI '22 (Student Design Competition)

  • Reviewer: AH ('18, 19, 20), CHI ('19, 20, 21, 22, 23), DIS ('22), IJHCS ('19), ISS ('19, 22), MobileHCI ('19), SIGGRAPH ASIA ('19, 20), TEI ('18), UIST ('19, 20, 22)

  • Student Volunteer: UIST' 17, CHI' 21

  • Session Chair: PyCon US' 14

Volunteering
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