News

Several UbiWell Lab members will be attending UbiComp/ISWC 2026 in Shanghai! We’re looking forward to a busy week of presenting our research, participating in workshops and the Doctoral Colloquium, leading a hands-on tutorial, and helping organize the Mental Health workshop.

We are looking for highly motivated students interested in the intersection of Ubiquitous Computing and Health to join our lab in 2027, with a focus on Machine Learning for human behaviors.

We have six new papers accepted at IMWUT, to be presented at UbiComp 2026 in Shanghai!

Akshat Choube and Ha Le will be leading a hands-on tutorial at UbiComp/ISWC 2026 on building multi-agent AI systems for mobile and wearable sensing data.

Our lab attended the UbiComp + Health Symposium at NYU.

We are thrilled to announce that Ha has been named as a 2026 Apple AI/ML Scholar in Human-Centered AI!

We are excited to announce that Jiachen received the Best Paper Honorable Mention for her 2026 CHI Paper that she presented in Barcelona!

Congratulations to Ha for receiving Northeastern University’s Outstanding PhD Student Award in Humanics for 2026. This award recognizes graduate students who, through their education, have integrated human literacy with data and technology in their learning or research.

We are excited to announce that Akshat has received the ThinkSwiss Research Scholarship!

We are thrilled to receive funding from OpenAI as part of their AI and Mental Health Grant Program for our project, “From Signals to Sensemaking: Safe AI Reasoning in Adolescent Digital Phenotyping.”

Our team has three full papers accepted at CHI 2026, to be presented in Barcelona!

We have two new papers accepted at IMWUT, to be presented at UbiComp 2026 in Shanghai!

Varun was invited to give three talks at various special sessions and workshops at the International Conference on Biomedical Health Informatics (BHI) in Atlanta.

Several lab members attended UbiComp 2025 in Finland!

We have two new papers accepted at IMWUT, to be presented at UbiComp 2025 in Finland!

Varun was invited to participate in a panel discussion on “Harnessing the Power of AI to Enable Highly Personalized Anytime/Anywhere Mental Health and Substance Use Care” at the International Conference on Digital Health in Helsinki.

We are thrilled to share that our lab has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to support our research on designing intelligent, context-aware systems for digital health interventions.

Huge congratulations to Vedant, who will be joining NYU Tandon School of Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025.

Vedant and Ha attended CHI 2025 in Yokohama!

Jiachen will be going to Seattle over the summer to intern in the Health Futures team at Microsoft Research!

Our team has three full papers accepted at CHI 2025, to be presented in Yokohama!

Jiachen presented her work-in-progress paper at the AAAI Fall Symposium Series on AI for Aging in Place at Alexandria, VA.

Several lab members attended the Digital Health Summit at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

Varun was invited to co-organize a workshop on the challenges and opportunities with wearables at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) in Prague.

Several lab members attended UbiComp 2024 in Melbourne!

Akshat presented his paper at ACII 2024 in Glasgow, UK.

We received funding from Templeton Foundation to conduct a novel study to expand our work on adolescent social media use.

We received pilot funding from Northeastern to study adolescent social media use.

Varun was invited to present our work at BostonCHI and at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Emory University

We received pilot funding from the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH).

Varun was invited to give a keynote at the NetHealth workshop located at COMSNETS 2024.

We have two new PhD students joining the lab this Fall: Akshat and Dorsa

Our collaborative work with Dartmouth’s Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH), Kaiser Permanente, and IBM Research, on using smartphones and wearables to detect relapse in Opioid Use Disorder treatment was highlighted in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) July 2023 Advisory, Digital Therapeutics for Management and Treatment in Behavioral Health.

ACM GetMobile highlighted our work on detecting receptivity for digital health interventions in their June 2023 issue.

The primary outcomes paper from the D-TECT project is published in JMIR.

Varun and colleagues won an IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award at UbiComp 2022 for their paper, Detecting Receptivity for mHealth Interventions in the Natural Environment.

We have three new PhD students joining the lab this Fall: Ha, Tinashe, and Jiachen.

The Ubiquitous Computing for Health and Well-being (UbiWell) lab is set up at Northeastern University.