JANURY 12, 2024
Asif Salekin, PhD
Assistant Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Syracuse University
About the Presentation: Human-centered sensing and computing can improve smart healthcare, homes, workplaces, education, and accessibility. Despite the progress in incorporating technology into these areas, persistent research gaps hinder their practical, real-world use. My research adopts a holistic approach to bridge these gaps, focusing on considering human factors, challenges, and nuances in solution development. This includes integrating heterogeneous multi-modal data, discovering previously unknown health markers, effectively managing natural distribution shifts in human data, and prioritizing fairness, privacy preservation, and reliable sensing. Understanding unique, independent patterns in human events, particularly diseases, across different times and sensing modalities is crucial. Integrating various sensing modalities goes beyond data fusion, considering their nuances, correlation, and domain knowledge. Identifying latent health indicators, particularly without substantial labeled data, presents a challenge. Natural shifts in human data stemming from contextual variations pose difficulties for traditional AI robustness techniques. Addressing fairness and bias issues is paramount, particularly in healthcare, ensuring equitable treatment and ethical standards. Privacy, security, and safety concerns limit the broad use of human sensing solutions, emphasizing the need for reliability and trustworthiness, especially in sensitive health applications. This talk will delve into my research efforts addressing these challenges and outline future directions. These endeavors collectively pave the way for seamlessly integrating human-centered sensing and computing solutions into our everyday lives.
About the Presenter: Dr. Asif Salekin is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University. His research sits at the intersection of Human-Centered Computing, Machine Learning, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Usable Sensing Security and Privacy within the realm of Ubiquitous Computing, where a core focus is to integrate human-centered computing and sensing solutions to advance Smart and Mobile Health.
Currently, he leads the Laboratory for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Sensing, where his works have been featured in top-tier computer science venues, including IMWUT/Ubicomp, DAC, AAAI Applied Intelligence, EWSN, INTERSPEECH, etc., and prestigious journals, such as Nature Molecular Psychiatry, 2023, and PNAS 2022. Notably, one of his papers on Preclinical-stage Alzheimer’s Disease Detection received the prestigious ‘IAAI Deployed Application Award’ in 2021. In 2016, his paper, titled AsthmaGuide, was nominated for the Best Paper award at the Wireless Health 2016. He received the Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Research from the UVA CS Department in 2018.
To date, his research has been funded by two NSF grants and three NIH grants. Currently, he is serving as an Associate Editor (AE) for the journal ‘The Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)’ and for the conference ‘UbiComp,’ which is the leading publication platform for ubiquitous computing research. He is also an Associate Editor (AE) for ‘ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare.’
For more details, check his website: https://asalekin.github.io/