Abstract

The wearable era is here. Computational models can now faithfully explain minute human behaviours and vital signs by analysing wearable data. Representative learning models with acoustics and motion signatures obtained from a pair of earbuds can meaningfully interpret an individual’s facial expressions, emotions, and mental health. Naturally, this new paradigm is creating interminable possibilities. It is opening doors for wearables to augment our awareness, cognition, and intelligence; improve our health; revolutionise our healthcare systems and help us experience physical and digital reality in radically different ways.

In this talk, I will explore the system and algorithmic challenges in modelling and augmenting human behaviour in this new sensory wearable era. I will discuss multiple sensory wearables and their capabilities and explain what drove our design decisions. Then, I will present SensiX – a multi-sensory edge ML framework that dynamically creates an execution pipeline for collaborative wearable sensing systems. SensiX operates on two key functions, a neural translation operation for principled mapping of device-to-device data and a selection operation to systematically choose the right device(s) as a function of model accuracy. A contextual discovery function and resource-aware runtime scheduler further augment these two functions. Collectively, SensiX automates the selection and transformation of heterogeneous sensor streams for accurate, robust and energy-efficient execution of sensory models on wearables. I will end the talk by highlighting a set of real-world case studies with this multi-sensory wearable platform in the areas of Quantified Lifestyle, Digital Health and Smart Enterprises.

Bio

Dr Fahim Kawsar is the Founding Director of Pervasive Systems research at Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, UK and holds a Design United Professorship at TU Delft, Netherlands. He spends most of his time at Cambridge building sensory systems with novel computational forms to explain human behaviour with other people, places, and things. He is intrigued by the power of design and frequently visits TU Delft to teach and debate the influence of sensory systems in redefining data-driven design, and vice versa. Fahim is a frequent keynote speaker, (co-)authored 150+ publications, filed 40+ patents, is an AEIC of IEEE Pervasive Computing, sits at the editorial board of ACM IMWUT , serves (or served) as a committee member of leading mobile and ubiquitous computing conferences and had multiple million-scale projects commissioned.

Link to join: https://cl-cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91253900399?pwd=SU5TNnpYdDlQbzQ4SEVPVWVWa0Nldz09

A recording of this talk is available within the University of Cambridge at the following link: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/seminars/wednesday/video/