Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated many low- and middle-income countries, causing widespread food insecurity and a sharp decline in living standards. In response to this crisis, governments and humanitarian organizations worldwide have distributed social assistance to more than 1.5 billion people. Targeting is a central challenge in administering these programmes: it remains a difficult task…

Some forms of movement, such as rocking, are common means of sensory self-regulation yet are discouraged in classroom contexts. We analyze the ableist underpinnings of this discouragement, and ask instead: could intrinsically attractive sensory activities such as rocking instead be solicited to serve content learning? Our design-based research project, Balance Board Math, fosters sensory–…

The Internet of Things (IoT) has influenced technology in numerous ways. What started as a network of physical devices communicating over the Internet grew tremendously sophisticated by incorporating billions of devices and defining specific IoT domains. IoT has found its subdomains in many fields such as medicine, healthcare, robotics, etc., and several domains are yet to incorporate IoT. One…

It is often said that quantum technologies are poised to change the world as we know it, but cutting through the hype, what will quantum technologies actually mean for countries and their citizens? In Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Simson L. Garfinkel explain the genesis of quantum information science (QIS) and the resulting quantum technologies that are…

Any nation’s growth depends on the trend of the price of fuel. The fuel price drifts have both direct and indirect impacts on a nation’s economy. Nation’s growth will be hampered due to the higher level of inflation prevailing in the oil industry. This paper proposed a method of analyzing Gasoline and Diesel Price Drifts based on Self-organizing Maps and Bayesian regularized neural networks.…

In home decoration, an artwork with a particular combination of colors can convey a positive mood that improves psychological health. In our work, we leverage emotion to color mapping techniques and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate artwork that brings a room into a more positive mood. We create a unique workflow to extract the color scheme from a room photo, convert it to an…

In the aftermath of stock market crash due to COVID-19, not all sectors recovered in the same way. Recently, a stock price model is proposed by Mahata et al. (2021) that describes V- and L-shaped recovery of the stocks and indices, but fails to simulate the U- and Swoosh-shaped recovery that arises due to sharp fall, continuation at the low price and followed by quick recovery, slow…

For a small portion of U.S. schoolchildren and their teachers, going to school online was the norm even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a mass shift to remote learning. Finding conventional schooling ill-suited to their needs, this diverse group turned to virtual schools in an effort to distance themselves from harms they associate with the traditional school experience, balance their…

Public and private organizations alike compute statistics from personal data. These statistics are used for a wide array of purposes, such as informing federal, state, and local policymaking, distributing humanitarian aid during crisis situations, and informing the public about social, economic, and health trends in the population. However, statistical uses of personal data can harm…

We undertake a longitudinal study with high temporal recording density, capturing daily electroencephalograms (EEG) of an individual in an in-situ setting for 370 consecutive days. Resting-state EEG retains a high level of stability over the course of the year, and inter-session variability remains unchanged, whether the sessions are one day, one week, or one month apart. On the other hand,…

The increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), has led researchers and visionaries to think in the direction of machines outperforming humans by gaining intelligence equal to or greater than humans, which may not always have a positive impact on the society. AI gone rogue, and Technological Singularity are major concerns in academia as well as the industry. It is necessary to…

How do people come to believe conspiracy theories, and what role does the internet play in this process as a socio-technical system? We explore these questions by examining online participants in the "chemtrails" conspiracy, the idea that visible condensation trails behind airliners are deliberately sprayed for nefarious purposes. We apply Weick's theory of sensemaking to examine the role of…

Visual data exploration enables analysts to identify trends and patterns, generate and verify hypotheses, and detect outliers and anomalies. However, the overwhelming number of decisions required in visual data exploration presents a barrier to discovering useful, action-able insights from data. To address this challenge, in this dissertation, we investigate how automated assistance via…

Curiosity of the human mind and the possibility of settlement in other planets to decrease the likelihood of human extinction have acted as a catalyst in the colonization mission of the planet Mars. Exploration, colonization and human missions to the planet are being supported by many public space agencies. Although there are several factors like toxic soil, low gravity, radiation exposures…

Energy is critical infrastructure, and addressing cybersecurity issues in the energy sector is challenging. Cloud computing has advanced from being a data storage solution to a complex system that enables resource management, workforce management, scalability, flexibility, managing operational expenses, etc. The energies sector relies heavily on critical infrastructure and cloud usage. Hence,…

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…