News
2026
At PhD graduation, Matthew Landers received the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s outstanding PhD award. Many congratulations!
The Early-Stage Research Award honors Link Lab graduate students who have demonstrated excellence in research and scholarship during the early and mid-stages of their graduate studies. This year, PhD student Maria Cardei was one of two awardees. Congratulations!
Our paper “BraVE: Offline reinforcement learning for discrete combinatorial action spaces” by Matthew Landers, Taylor Killian, Tom Hartvigsen, and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
Undergraduate student Sofia Luis was one of five Systems Engineering students honored at the Excellence in Engineering Gala this March.
The paper “Evaluating the Physics and Repeatability of Human Brushers in Delivering Affective Touch” by Zachary T. Landsman, Matthew Clark, Seongkook Heo, Afsaneh Doryab, and Greg Gerling was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
2025
Our paper “Biobehavioral Rhythms in Everyday Life: Data and Models for Capturing Cyclic Behavior in Naturalistic Settings” by Chong Zhao, Maria Ana Cardei, Matthew Clark, Runze Yan, and Afsaneh Doryab was accepted to the Association for Computing Machinery’s journal Proceedings on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. Congratulations!
Our paper “Factorized Deep Q-Network for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Victim Tagging” by Maria Cardei and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.
Our paper “Towards an accessible, noninvasive micronutrient status assessment method: a comprehensive review of existing techniques” by Andrew Balch, Maria Cardei, Sibylle Kranz, and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in ACM Transactions on computing for Healthcare.
Our paper “Exploring Smartphone-based Spectrophotometry for Vitamin B12 Quantification” by Andrew Balch, Maria Cardei, and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in Companion of the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
Our paper “Parameter Transfer for Single-Task Reinforcement Learning” by Matthew Landers and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted by the 2025 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).
Graduation Day Celebration
Congratulations to PhD Student Maria Cardei for receiving the UVA CS Department Graduate Service Award for 2024-2025! She currently serves as the CS Graduate Student Group Social Co-Chair, where she has taken the lead in organizing events that foster connection, well-being, and community among graduate students. From fun outings to department-wide gatherings, she has helped create spaces for students to connect and build community.
Congratulations to PhD Student Maria Cardei for being selected by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program! This prestigious and competitive fellowship funds exceptional graduate students for three years of research.
Our paper “Enabling Meaningful Communication Through Personalization” by Matt Clark and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted for the conference 2025 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops).
PhD Students Maria Cardei and Matt Clark led the UVA Women in Computer Science (WiCS) CS Research Workshop.
Our paper “Predicting the Severity of Anxiety in Adolescents Through Passively Sensed Behaviors” by Elaine Zhang, Matt Clark, and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted as a regular paper to the 2025 IEEE/ACM Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems, and Engineering Technologies (IEEE/ACM CHASE ‘25).
Congratulations to Andrew Balch for being named as a finalist for the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award! Just 24 students nationwide received this level of recognition for their contributions to computing research. You can learn more about the award at the CRA website.
2024
PhD student Maria Cardei has been reelected for another term as the Social Chair in UVA’s Computer Science Graduate Student Group.
Our paper “Feasibility of Smartphones for Accessible, Noninvasive Micronutrient Assessment” by Andrew Balch and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.
Our paper “Towards Smartphone-Based Monitoring of Micronutrient Status” by Andrew Balch and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted to Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Health Informatics.
Undergraduate Student Andrew Balch presented a demo of a smartphone-based spectrophotometer for micronutrient assessment at MobiCom 2024 in Washington D.C.! His presentation was awarded 3rd place in the undergraduate category of MobiCom’s Student Research Competition. Check out this page to learn more about the nutrition project!
Our paper Practical Heuristics for Victim Tagging During a Mass Casualty Incident Emergency Medical Response authored by PhD student Maria Cardei and Afsaneh Doryab, has been published in the 2024 IEEE 20th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). Maria traveled to Bari, Italy to present our work!
PhD Student Matt Clark presented two Melodies papers at UbiComp 2024 in Melbourne, Australia! He also served as a student volunteer for the conference, winning an award for exemplary service!
Our paper “Creating Emotion-Evoking Music to Communicate Wellness for Users with Diverse Musical Backgrounds” by Jason Chin, Matt Clark, and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing.
Our paper “Practical heuristics for victim tagging during a mass casualty incident emergency medical response” by Maria Cardei and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the 2024 IEEE 20th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE).
Andrew Balch was featured in a piece by UVA Today on the Dean’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship program! You can check it out here.
Our workshop paper “Creating Emotion-Evoking Music to Communicate Wellness for Users with Diverse Musical Backgrounds” by Jason Chin, Matt Clark, and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted to the WellComp 2024 workshop at UbiComp.
Our abtract “Multi-Agent System for Optimizing Victim Tagging in Human/Autonomous Responder Teams” by PhD student Maria Cardei and Afsaneh Doryab, has been published in the 2024 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS).
Our paper “Changing Your Tune: Lessons for Using Music to Encourage Physical Activity” by Matt Clark and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).
Our paper “Changing your tune: Lessons for using music to encourage physical activity” by Matthew Clark and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).
Our paper “Multi-Agent System for Optimizing Victim Tagging in Human/Autonomous Responder Teams” by Maria Cardei and Afsaneh Doryab has been accepted by the 15th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS). Congratulations!
PhD student Matt Clark recieved the computer science department’s Computer Science Gradaute Service Award, and Andrew Balch received an honorable mention for the undergradaute research award!
Andrew Balch presented his poster on a smartphone-based spectrophotometer for Vitamin B12 quantification at the 2024 Commonwealth Cyber Initiative Symposium in Richmond, Virginia!
PhD student Maria Cardei has been elected to serve as the Social Chair in UVA’s Computer Science Graduate Student Group. PhD student Matt Clark has been elected to serve as a co-general chair of the Computer Science Graduate Student Group.
2023
Congratulations to Matt Clark for presenting the paper “Sounds of Health: Using Personalized Sonification Models to Communicate Health Information” at UbiComp 2023!
Congratulations to Matt Clark for being selected as one of the Link Lab student flashtalk speakers for his work on Melodies!
We welcome Maria Cardei and Sabit Ahmed, two new computer science PhD student’s joining the HAI Lab.
Our paper “Deep reinforcement learning verification: A survey” by Matthew Landers and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in ACM Computing Surveys.
Our lab’s 4th year System’s Engineering Capstoene “Personalization in Circadian Rhythm-Based Event Scheduling” by Prachi Sadekar, Jackson Baitinger, Sean Conway, Matt Clark and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the 2023 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS).
Our paper “Sounds of Health: Using Personalized Sonification Models to Communicate Health Information” by Matt Clark and Afsaneh Doryab has been published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT).
PhD student Matt Clark has been reelected for another term as the Social Chair in UVA’s Computer Science Graduate Student Group.
2022
PhD student Matt Clark has been elected to serve as the Social Chair in UVA’s Computer Science Graduate Student Group.
2021
We welcome Matt Clark and Matt Landers, two new computer science PhD student’s joining the HAI Lab.