Publications
The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus in late 2019 brought severe devastation to the world. The pandemic spread across the globe, infecting more than ten million people and disrupting several businesses. Although social distancing and the use of protective masks were suggested all over the world, the cases seem to rise, which led to worldwide lockdown in different phases. The rampant...
Algorithms engineered to leverage rich behavioral and biometric data to predict individual attributes and actions continue to permeate public and private life. A fundamental risk may emerge from misconceptions about the sensitivity of such data, as well as the agency of individuals to protect their privacy when fine-grained (and possibly involuntary) behavior is tracked. In this work, we...
As the number of users getting acquainted with the Internet is escalating rapidly, there is more user-generated content on the web. Comprehending hidden opinions, sentiments, and emotions in emails, tweets, reviews, and comments is a challenge and equally crucial for social media monitoring, brand monitoring, customer services, and market research. Sentiment analysis determines the emotional...
Medical Cyber-Physical Systems (MCPS) are complex, location-aware, networked systems of medical devices that can be used as a piece of the healing center to give the best medical care to patients. Hence, they integrate human, cyber, and physical elements. Since MCPSs are life-critical and context-aware, they are significant to the healthcare industry, which is prone to data breaches and cyber-...
Exoplanet detection is an extremely active research topic in astronomy. Researchers in the past have attempted to detect exoplanets using conventional methods like Radial Velocity, Transit Method, Gravitational Microlensing, Direct Imaging, Polarimetry, Astrometry, etc. While the approaches undertaken for all these studies vary, many of the research works conducted are based on the change in...
Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more,...
Technological advancement has contributed immensely to human life and society. Technologies like industrial robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are advancing at a rapid pace. While the evolution of Artificial Intelligence has contributed significantly to the development of personal assistants, automated drones, smart home devices, etc., it has also raised questions about the...
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most powerful platforms that incorporates several other technological components within itself. The IoT ecosystem comprises devices, communications, protocols, analytics, cloud, automation, etc. Its magnitude keeps on increasing with the addition of tools and services. While IoT has many advantages like connectivity, efficiency, and convenience, it is a...
The functionality of the Internet and the Web are determined in large part by the design of technical standards that allow for interoperable implementations. Those design decisions are important both in terms of functionality and in maintaining basic public policy values including accessibility, freedom of expression, privacy and security. This is one instance of a phenomenon variously...
In 1950 Robert L. Gitler went to Japan to found the first college-level school of library science in that country. His mission, an improbable success, was documented in an assisted autobiography as Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Subsequent research into initiatives to improve library services during the Allied occupation has revealed surprising...
This dissertation investigates social biosensing: the sharing of physiological information between people, particularly through the lens of empathy and related interpersonal psychological processes. Self-tracking is the the collection and sharing of physiological information about oneself and has been a focus in academic research, but a next step in the use of this data, particularly...
The standard response to concerns about “black box” algorithms is to make those algorithms transparent or explainable. Explainability is an additional design goal for machine-learning systems. Driven in part by growing recognition of the limits of transparency to foster human understanding of algorithmic systems, and in part by pursuit of other goals such as safety and human compatibility,...
Enhancing machine capabilities to answer questions has been a topic of considerable focus in recent years of NLP research. Language models like Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo)[1] and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [2] have been very successful in developing general purpose language models that can be optimized for a large number of downstream language...
The need for electronic health records to be transferred between institutions is large and growing. Ensuring smooth and accurate identification of patients is a privacy problem endemic to data storage in all fields. The field of data science must design and implement best practices in data stewardship, to ensure that security breaches do not under mine data privacy.
Recognizing the prevalence of initiatives to align technology with social values through design and “by design” (such as privacy by design, security by design, and governance by design), this dissertation explores the current and potential role of design techniques in attending to values, and analyzes user experience (UX) professionals’ “values work” practices—practices used to surface,...