Alex Olwal, Ph.D.
Engineering Leader / Product Innovation, R&D and User Experience

Human—AI Interaction · 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

AR Language
Augmented Language was featured in the Google I/O 2022 Keynote. Live translation of speech in everyday glasses has the potential to make language more universally accessible and understandable.

"Let's see what happens when we take our advances in translation and transcription, and deliver them in your line-of-sight in one of the early prototypes that we have been testing." (Sundar Pichai, CEO Google)
SpeechCompass: Enhancing Mobile Captioning with Diarization and Directional Guidance via Multi-Microphone Localization
Dementyev, A., Kanevsky, D., Yang, S., Parvaix, M., Lai, C., and Olwal, A.
Proceedings of CHI 2025 - Best Paper Award (Top 1%) (ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Yokohama, Japan, Apr 26-May 1, 2025, pp. 1-17.

CHI 2025 - Best Paper Award (Top 1%)
PDF []
InstructPipe: Generating Visual Blocks Pipelines with Human Instructions and LLMs
Zhou, Z., Jin, J., Phadnis, V., Yuan, X., Jiang, J., Qian, X., Wright, K., Sherwood, M., Mayes, J., Zhou, J., Huang, Y., Xu, Z., Zhang, Y., Lee, J., Olwal, A., Kim, D., Iyengar, R., Li, N., and Du, R.
Proceedings of CHI 2025 - Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) (ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Yokohama, Japan, Apr 26-May 1, 2025, pp. 1-22.

CHI 2025 - Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%)
PDF []
Wearable Subtitles: Augmenting Spoken Communication with Lightweight Eyewear for All-day Captioning
Olwal, A., Balke, K., Votintcev, D., Starner, T., Conn, P., Chinh, B., and Corda, B.
Proceedings of UIST 2020 - Best Demo Honorable Mention Award (ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology), Virtual Event, Oct 20-23, 2020, pp. 1108-1120.

UIST 2020 - Best Demo Honorable Mention Award
PDF [16MB]
Quantifying The Effect of Simulator-Based Data Augmentation for Speech Recognition on Augmented Reality Glasses
Arakawa, R., Parvaix, M., Lai, C., Erdogan, H., and Olwal, A.
Proceedings of ICASSP 2024 (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing), Seoul, South Korea, Apr 14-19, 2024, pp. 726-730.

ICASSP 2024
PDF [2.4MB]
ChatDirector: Enhancing Video Conferencing with Space-Aware Scene Rendering and Speech-Driven Layout Transition
Qian, X., Tan, F., Zhang, Y., Collins, B., Kim, B., Olwal, A., Ramani, K., and Du, R.
Proceedings of CHI 2024 (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Honolulu, HI, May 11-16, 2024, pp. 1-16.

CHI 2024
PDF [2.3MB]
Visual Captions: Augmenting Verbal Communication with On-the-fly Visuals
Liu, X, Kirilyuk, V., Yuan, X, Olwal, A., Chi, P., Chen, X., and Du, R.
Proceedings of CHI 2023 (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Hamburg, Germany, Apr 23-28, 2023, pp. 1-20.

CHI 2023
PDF [30MB]
Modeling and Improving Text Stability in Live Captions
Liu, B., Zhang, J., Ferrer, L., Xu, S., Bahirwani, V., Smus, B., Olwal, A., and Du, R.
CHI 2023 Extended Abstracts (SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), Hamburg, Germany, Apr 23-28, 2023, pp. 1-9.

CHI 2023
PDF [3MB]
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