Contact Info

ethomaz at utexas dot edu

EER 7.818
2501 Speedway
Austin, TX 78712

Office Hours

Fall 2026
Monday 1-2pm

Teaching

Fall 2026
EE422C Software Design II

Affiliations

I am an Associate Professor and William H. Hartwig 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 sensing and machine perception using wearable and ubiquitous technologies. My students and I explore how to build computational systems that make sense of people; intelligent systems that recognize and model 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, iMAGiNE and a faculty affiliate of CAPS. I am an Editor of IMWUT and Steering Committee Chair for UbiComp.

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Interested in research positions and opportunities? Please visit the page for prospective students.

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Recent News | All

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  Detecting Conversations with Smartwatches
Social interaction is a key health determinant but very difficult to quantify in real-world settings. Our recent article published at ACM TIST, led by Alice, shows how this can be achieved with commodity smartwatches.
August 2026

  Outreach Summer Camp
This summer, we had the opportunity to take our WildSense STEM workshop camp to Del Valle Middle School, just outside of Austin. We had a few days of fun exploring the micro:bit platform with a class of about 15 students, teaching them Scratch and how to work with sensors on the board to build a variety of applications.
June 2026

  Eating Microstructure Sensing
With our collaborators at the University of Rhode Island, we are exploring how to characterize the microstructure of eating with a wearable facial sensor. The first paper from this line of work was published at the Nutrients journal.
May 2026

  ADM with Wearable Rings
Wearable rings have become popular. Our work exploring the potential of wearable rings for detecting eating events has been published at the PACM IMWUT. You can check out the paper here. It was a great collaborative effort led by Bobby Chiu.
Jan 2026

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Recent Activities | All

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