Hi! I’m a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I am advised by James Fogarty. My research is focused on enabling people to more effectively collect and use data particularly in the domain of health. This often involves building prototype systems, designing interaction techniques, and developing computational algorithms that allow individuals to control data and AI systems and align these systems to evolving needs and context. Specifically, I have worked on: 1) novel frameworks and architectures that augment people’s expertise in using their personal data for well-being, 2) data-driven behavior planning techniques that scaffold data sense-making in health behavior change, and 3) computational methods that characterize and quantify the impact of social adversities on mental and emotional state. In these efforts, I have combined theories and formative qualitative or quantitative studies to understand needs and considerations. I have leveraged this knowledge in designing, building, and evaluating systems via controlled or observational experiments and field deployments. Supporting these contributions I have built data processing pipelines for large scale longitudinal studies and foundation model based solutions.

I am a Meta PhD Fellowship recipient. Before coming to UW, I obtained my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and M.Sc. degrees in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of British Columbia (SPIN Lab) and Computer Vision at the Simon Fraser University (Vision & Media Lab). I also worked as a software developer in the Jonah Group (later acquired by 3Pillar Global). Additional details are in my CV.

Selected Publications

Full list of my publications at DBLP / Google Scholar profiles.

Sefidgar Y.S., Castillo C.L., Chopra S., Jiang L., Jones T., Mittal A., Ryu H., Schroeder J., Cole A., Marinova N., Munson S., Fogarty J. “MigraineTracker: Examining Patient Experiences with Goal-Directed Self-Tracking for a Chronic Health Condition”, CHI’24 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024). [DOI] [PDF] (Best Paper Award)

Sefidgar Y.S., Jörke M., Suh J., Saha K., Iqbal S., Ramos G., Czerwinski M. “Improving Work-Nonwork Balance with Data-Driven Implementation Intention with Mental Contrasting”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2023).[DOI] [PDF]

Jörke M., Sefidgar Y.S., Massachi T. Suh J., Ramos G. “Pearl: A Technology Probe for Machine-Assisted Reflection on Personal Data”, International Conference on Intelligence User Interfaces (2023).[DOI] [PDF]

Creswell J.D., Tumminia M. J., Price S., Sefidgar Y.S., Cohen S, Ren Y., Brown J., Dey A.K., Dutcher J.M., Villalba D., Mankoff J., Xu X., Creswell K., Doryab A., Mattingly S., Striegel A., Hachen D., Martinez G., Lovett M.C. “Nightly sleep duration predicts grade point average in the first year of college”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2023) [DOI] [PDF]

Sefidgar Y.S., Jörke M., Suh J., Saha K., Iqbal S., Ramos G., Czerwinski M. “Lessons Learned for Data-Driven Implementation Intentions with Mental Contrasting”, Extended Abstracts of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2023). [DOI] [PDF]

Morris M., Kuehn K.S., Brown J.S., Nurius P.S., Sefidgar Y.S., Riskin E., Dey A.K., Xu X., Consolvo S., Mankoff J. “College from Home during COVID-19: a Mixed-methods Study of Heterogeneous Experiences”, PloS one (2021). [DOI] [PDF]

Nurius P., Sefidgar Y.S., Kuehn K.S., Jung J., Zhang H., Figueira O., Dey A.K., Riskin E., Mankoff J. “Distress Among Undergraduates: Marginality, Stressors and Resilience Resources”, Journal of American College Health (2021). [DOI] [PDF]

Sefidgar Y.S., Seo W., Kuehn K.S., Althoff T., Browning A., Riskin E., Nurius P., Dey A.K., Mankoff J. “Passively-sensed Behavioral Correlates of Discrimination Events in College Students”, Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (2019). [DOI] [PDF]

Sefidgar Y.S., Weng T., Harvey H., Elliott S., Cakmak M. “RobotIST: Interactive Situated Tangible Robot Programming”, ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (2018). [DOI] [PDF]

Sefidgar Y.S., Agarwal P., Cakmak M. “Situated Tangible Robot Programming”, International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2017). [DOI] [PDF] (Best Paper Award Finalist)

Sefidgar Y.S., MacLean K.E., Yohanan S., Van der Loos M., Croft E.A., Garland E.J. “Design and Evaluation of a Touch-Centered Calming Interaction with a Social Robot”. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2016). [DOI] [PDF]

Sefidgar Y.S., Vahdat A., Se S., Mori G. “Discriminative Key-Component Models for Interaction Detection and Recognition”. Computer Vision and Image Understanding (2015). [DOI] [PDF]

Upcoming

Sefidgar Y.S., Sharma A., Riskin E., Nurius P., Dey A.K., Mankoff J., Fogarty J., Althoff T. “Submodular Behavior Summarization”, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (in preparation).

Sefidgar Y.S., Nurius P., Baughan A., Elkin L., Dey A.K., Riskin E., Mankoff J., Morris M. “Considerations and Opportunities for Technologies to Support Students Experiencing Everyday Discrimination”, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (in preparation). [arXiv]