Project Details
Program
Computer Science
Field of Study
Machine Learning, IoT and Wearable Sensing, Time-Series Modeling
Division
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
Faculty Lab Link
Project Description
AI today is good at predicting your next click — but not whether you are about to burn out. A digital twin that flags rising blood pressure but cannot link it to weeks of after-hours work, financial strain, or fading social ties has missed the point. Most digital health systems track a single signal in isolation and treat wellbeing as a fixed, narrowly-scoped concept. This project builds a Wholebeing Digital Twin — an AI model that fuses multimodal data from wearables, smartphones, and short self-reports across several interconnected life domains (physical, mental, social, occupational, environmental, financial, and digital) to deliver a context-aware, time-sensitive view of holistic wellbeing. Three intertwined research challenges drive the work: (i) scoring each domain from noisy, sparse, multimodal signals where some dimensions are easy to sense passively (physical, digital) while others are not (social, emotional); (ii) prioritizing domains dynamically, since their importance shifts with age, role, culture, and life events — a child does not weigh occupational satisfaction the same way an adult does; and (iii) modeling inter-domain links so the twin can explain why wellbeing is changing, not just that it is. The work is grounded on a pilot involving smartphone passive sensing, wearable devices, and ecological momentary assessment. The intern will help build the mobile data-collection app, develop a time-series pipeline that learns time-varying domain priorities, and contribute to a peer-reviewed publication.
About the Researcher
Basem Shihada
Professor, Computer Science
Affiliations
Education Profile
- Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2007
- M.S. Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2001
- B.S. Computer Science, United Arab Emirates University, United Arab Emirates, 1997
Research Interests
Professor Shihada's current research covers a wide range of topics in wired and wireless communication networks, including wireless mesh, wireless sensor, multimedia, and optical networks. He is also interested in network security and cloud computing.Selected Publications
- Li Xia and B. Shihada, "Power and Delay Optimization for Multi-Hop Wireless Networks," International Journal of Control, Accepted, 2014.
- A. Showail, K. Jamshaid, and B. Shihada, "WQM: An Aggregation-aware Queue Management Scheme for IEEE 802.11n based Networks", in Proc. ACM Sigcomm Capacity Sharing Workshop (CSWS), Accepted, 2014.
- A. Dhaini, P-H. Ho, G. Shin, and B. Shihada, "Energy Efficiency in TDMA-based Next-Generation Passive Optical Access Networks", IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. PP, No. 99, 2013.
- Li Xia and B. Shihada, "Max-Min Optimality of Service Rate Control in Closed Queueing Networks," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 1051-1056, 2013.
- M. Suresh, R. Stolern, E. Zechman, and B. Shihada, "On Event Detection and Localization in Acyclic Flow Networks", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 708-723, 2013.
- A. Elwhishi, P-H. Ho, K. Naik, and B. Shihada, "A Novel Message Scheduling Framework for Delay Tolerant Networks Routing", IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 24, No. 5, pp. 871-880, 2013.
Desired Project Deliverables
1. A cross-platform mobile data-collection app integrating smartphone passive sensors, wearable device APIs (e.g., Fitbit), and ecological momentary assessment prompts.
2. A time-series modeling pipeline that ingests the multimodal streams and learns time-varying, per-domain wellbeing priorities, validated against baselines.
3. A final evaluation report and a co-authored research paper draft targeted at a top-tier IoT, pervasive computing, or digital-health venue.
Recommended Student Background
Mobile App Development (Flutter, React Native, or native iOS/Android)
Machine Learning and Deep Learning (PyTorch or TensorFlow)
Python Programming and Data Analytics
Time-Series Modeling (LSTM, Transformers)
We are shaping the
World of Research
Be part of the journey with VSRP
3-6 months
Internship period
100+
Research Projects
3.5/4
Cumulative GPA
310
Interns a Year