About Cheng Zhang

In SP 2023, my office hours will be held  4-5 PM on Tue and Thu. 

Please refer to SciFi Lab for the latest update on my research.

I am always looking for students (both undergrad and graduate) who have a strong interest in building intelligent sensing systems that address real-world challenges, to join SciFi Lab.  Feel free to drop me an email if you are interested. 

Cheng Zhang is an Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, where he directs the Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interaction (SciFi) Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science at Ubicomp Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Dr. Gregory Abowd (CS) and Dr.Omer Inan(ECE). His research interests are ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction(HCI). More specifically,  his research examines how to solicit information on and around the human body to address real-world challenges in various application areas, such as interaction, health sensing, and activity recognition.  His Ph.D. thesis presents over 10 different novel input techniques for wearables, some leveraging commodity devices while others incorporate new hardware. He usually builds intelligent sensing systems from the bottom to the top, including understanding the physical phenomenon, building hardware prototypes, designing form factors,  processing data, and designing algorithms (machine learning or physics-based modeling) His work is regularly published in top-tier conferences and journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp/IMWUT, UIST, CHI, ISWC, MobileHCI, and IUI, including two best paper awards), as well as over 20 pending U.S. and international patents. His work also has attracted the attention of various media outlets, including BBC, Forbes, New Scientist, Engadget, NowThis, Mashable, Gizmodo, VentureBeat, HackSter, ScienceDaily, DigitalTrends, ZDNet, New Scientist, RT, TechRadar, Phys.org.

He is also an alumnus of The Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results  (TI:GER) program, which is a joint program held between the Business School at Georgia Tech and the Law School at Emory University.  This program taught him how to commercialize new technology and present innovative products to the market. The work that leverages commodity devices has resulted in commercial impact, including licensing the watch input technology to Canadian startup ProximityHCI to improve the smartwatch interaction experience.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, he received his bachelor’s degree in software engineering from Nankai University and his master’s degree from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an outstanding graduate, where he started his curiosity on HCI and acquired his first-hand research experience across the tangible user interface, HCI for children, music interface.

He is an enthusiastic sports fan and enjoys running in his spare time.

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