Edison Thomaz

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I am an Assistant Professor and Texas Instruments/Kilby Fellow in the The Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, where I direct the Human Signals lab. My research focuses on human-centered machine perception using wearable and ubiquitous technologies. My students and I explore how to build computational systems that can make sense of people; systems that can recognize people's behaviors and activities, health conditions, emotional state, surronding context, social interactions and more. I am affiliated with DICE, bioECE and SES. I am also a member of WNCG and a faculty affiliate of CAPS. I am an Associate Editor of IMWUT and Technical Program Chair for UbiComp 2023.

Contact Info

ethomaz at utexas dot edu
Twitter: @ethomaz

EER 7.818
2501 Speedway
Austin, TX 78712

Office Hours

Fall 2023
Wed 1-2pm

Teaching

Fall 2023
EE422C Software Design II

Spring 2024
EE382V Human Signals

Ph.D. Students

Dawei Liang
Priyanka Khante
Yufei Shen
Sloke Shrestha
Alice Zhang
Gautham Gudur

Ph.D. Alumni

Keum San Chun (2021)
Sibel Health

Xuewen Yao (2023)
Microsoft

Rebecca Adaimi (2023)
Oura

Affiliations







Fully-Funded Fall 2024 PhD Opportunities: We are looking for smart and creative students to join the Human Signals Lab starting in Fall 2024 to contribute to our research efforts in the areas of Mobile Health and Automated Dietary Monitoring (ADM). Interested? Find out more here.

Recent News | All

  Automated Face-To-Face Conversation Detection Paper
The paper titled "Automated Face-To-Face Conversation Detection on a Commodity Smartwatch with Acoustic Sensing" was accepted to IMWUT, and was presented at Ubicomp 2023 this month. Dawei led the work with key contributions by Alice.
Oct 2023

  New Member Joins the Lab
Gautham Gudur is the newest graduate student to join the Human Signals Lab. He is starting in Fall 2023 and is interested in exploring the fields of machine learning and federated learning in the context of activity recognition. Welcome to the lab.
Aug 2023

  Rebecca Defends PhD Thesis
Rebecca successfully defended her PhD thesis titled "Towards Lifelong and Long-Term Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition". Great body of work focused on machine learning for human activity recognition applications.
Jul 2023

  Ambient AI Workshp Best Paper
Dawei's research on foreground speech analysis has been accepted to the ICASSP 2023 Ambient AI Workshop and got a best paper award. The paper is titled "A Dataset for Foreground Speech Analysis with Smartwatches in Everyday Home Environments". Congrats Dawei.
Apr 2023

  Meta Research PhD Fellowship Received
Super congrats to Dawei, who received the Meta Research PhD Fellowship this year on the topic of Augmented Reality Audio. Dawei is developing a very nice body of work in this field.
Apr 2023

  NSF CAREER Awarded
Very excited and grateful to have received the NSF CAREER award. Looking forward to developing new methods and wearables to advance dietary monitoring over the next several years.
Mar 2023

  Xuewen Defends PhD Thesis
Xuewen, co-advised with Kaya de Barbaro, successfully defended her PhD thesis titled "Leveraging Pervasive Data to Study and Support Mother-Infant Dyads in the Wild". Congratulations Dr. Yao!
Mar 2023

  Speech Detection Paper at ICASSP
Dawei's research at Meta in Summer 2022 led to a paper titled "Dynamic Speech Endpoint Detection with Regression Targets". This work has been accepted to ICASSP 2023 and will be presented at the conference in Greece this year.
Feb 2023

Select Publications | All

Leveraging Sound and Wrist Motion to Detect ADLs with Commodity Smartwatches
Sarnab Bhattacharya, Rebecca Adaimi, Edison Thomaz
IMWUT 2022 | DOI

Acoustic Activity Recognition Bounded by Conversational Assistant Interactions
Rebecca Adaimi, Howard Yong, Edison Thomaz
IMWUT 2021 | DOI | Data + Code

Intraoral Temperature and Inertial Sensing in Automated Dietary Assessment
Keum San Chun, Sarnab Bhattacharya, Caroline Dolbear, Jordon Kashanchi, Edison Thomaz
ISWC 2020 | DOI

Detecting Eating by Tracking Jawbone Movements with a Non-Contact Wearable Sensor
Keum San Chun, Sarnab Bhattacharya, Edison Thomaz
IMWUT 2018 | DOI


Edison Thomaz © 2023