Keynotes

The introduction of wearable sensing technologies has shifted the emphasis of clinically-relevant health data from data collected in clinical settings to data collected outside of those settings. A growing number of devices, including commodity devices like smartphone and smartwatches, now provide measurements of critical health data throughout our daily lives. But there are still challenges to the creation of these devices. They consume too much power, limiting the time they are available to collect data and placing a burden on the individual to charge them. They are too costly to manufacture and also contribute to the growing problem of e-waste when they get past their lifetime. Using health as the driving application domain, I will show how different approaches to data collection and device manufacturing processes might address these threats to sustainability while still serving the health domain.

Gregory D. Abowd is the Dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, where he is also a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with affiliate appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, Dr. Abowd was faculty in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology for over 26 years, where he held the titles of Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Endowed Chair in the School in Interactive Computing. His research falls largely in the area of Human-Computer Interaction with an emphasis on applications and technology development for mobile and ubiquitous computing in everyday settings. His research has introduced innovations in the classroom, the home, for stakeholders connected with autism, and sustainable forms of computing in everyday life. He has been the founding Editor-in-Chief for two major journals and is the most highly cited researcher in HCI and ubiquitous computing in the world, according to csrankings.org (the second two are both his former PhD students). Dr. Abowd is a Fellow of the ACM and an elected member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. He received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award for Research from ACM SIGCHI. He was a 2009 recipient of the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Honors Mathematics (summa cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame in 1986 as well as a Master of Science (1987) and Doctor of Philosophy (1991) in Computation from the University of Oxford, where he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.

Robert Langer is one of 9 Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); being an Institute Professor is the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. He has written over 1,500 articles, which have been cited over 386,000 times; his h-index of 309 is the highest of any engineer in history and the 2^nd highest of any individual in any field. His patents have licensed or sublicensed to over 400 companies; he is a cofounder of a number of companies including Moderna. Dr. Langer served as Chairman of the FDA’s Science Board (its highest advisory board) from 1999-2002. His over 220 awards include both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (he is one of 3 living individuals to have received both these honors), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (often called the Engineering Nobel Prize), Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Albany Medical Center Prize, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Kyoto Prize, Wolf Prize for Chemistry, Millennium Technology Prize, Priestley Medal (highest award of the American Chemical Society), Gairdner Prize, Hoover Medal, Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences, BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, and the Balzan Prize. He holds 41 honorary doctorates, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Northwestern, and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors.

Rosalind Picard, Sc.D. is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, co-founder of Affectiva, Inc., providing Emotion AI technology, and co-founder and chief scientist of Empatica, Inc., creators of the first FDA-cleared smart watch using AI in epilepsy. Picard is author or co-author of over three hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in signal processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, human-computer interaction, affective computing, and neurology. She is known internationally for her book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name. She was a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems, helping boot up research on wearable computing in the 90’s. Picard is a fellow of the IEEE and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Picard leads research developing AI/machine learning algorithms, analytics, and sensors in order to improve human health and wellbeing.