Shumin Zhai (Chinese simplified: 翟树民) (born 1961) is a Chinese-born American Canadian Human–computer interaction (HCI) research scientist and inventor.

Dr. Zhai is currently a principal scientist at Google where he leads and directs research, design, and development of human-device input methods and haptics systems.

After that, he served on the faculty of the Northwest Institute of Telecommunication Engineering (now Xidian University) in Xi'an, China where he taught and conducted research in computer control systems until 1989.

[3] From 2001 to 2007, Dr. Zhai was a visiting adjunct professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University, where he also supervised graduate research.

[5][6] From 2011 till present, Dr. Zhai has been working at Google as a principal scientist, where he leads and directs research, design, and development of human-device input methods and haptics systems.

[10] In 2004, they presented SHARK2 that increased recognition accuracy and relaxed precision requirements by using the shape and location of gestures in addition to context based language models.

[13] By releasing the first word-gesture keyboard in 2004 through IBM AlphaWorks and a top ranked iPhone app called ShapeWriter WritingPad in 2008,[14] Dr. Zhai and his colleagues were able to facilitate this transition and brought the invention from the laboratory to real world users.

He investigated people's ability to coordinate multiple degrees of freedom, based on three ways of quantification: simultaneous time-on-target, error correlation, and efficiency.

[23] In 1999, he worked together with his colleagues (Carlos Morimoto and Steven Ihde) at IBM Almaden Research Center and published a paper Manual and gaze input cascaded (MAGIC) pointing.

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