Hi! I’m a PhD Student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I am advised by James Fogarty. I’m broadly interested in developing computational and data-driven systems to inform and support social and health interventions. My current research on personal informatics tools is focused on better supporting data collection and sense-making in the context of migraine. I am also working on tools and technqiues to further our understanding of social adversities such as everyday discrimination. I hope to draw on this knowledge to build interventions (a 7-minute video on this page summarizes my work along these lines).

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 and Computer Vision at the Simon Fraser University.

Selected Publications

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

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

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).

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]

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

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).

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).

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 Honorable Mention)

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).