Smart home and workplace environments that can sense human activities offer useful insights into critical user information, such as behavioral patterns, preferences, and health indicators. This data enables a wide range of data-driven applications that can assist people achieve personal and professional goals. In this talk, I will present a vision for creating a smart physical world on a massive scale by leveraging everyday materials, such as wood and fabric, embedded with sensors (referred to as “smart materials”). Through a series of projects and lessons learned throughout my research, I will highlight key aspects of smart materials that influence their feasibility and potential success in the future. I will conclude by emphasizing the important role of user-centered design in ensuring the success of a smart physical world.

Xing-Dong Yang is an Associate Professor and Visual Computing Chair of Computer Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada. His research is broadly in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where he creates interactive systems using novel sensing techniques and haptics to enable new user experiences within smart physical and virtual environments. Xing-Dong’s work is recognized through a Best Paper award at UIST 2019, eight Honorable Mention awards with one at UIST 2020, six at CHI (2010, 2016, 2018, 2019 × 2, 2020), and one at MobileHCI 2009. Aside from academic publications, Xing-Dong’s work attracts major public interest via news coverage from a variety of media outlets with different mediums, including TV (e.g., Discovery Daily Planet), print (e.g., The Wall Street Journal, Forbes), and Internet News (e.g., MIT Technology Review, New Scientist).