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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

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
Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division

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)