Zhiyuan Wang

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Systems and Information Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA), working with Prof. Laura E. Barnes in the Sensing Systems for Health Lab and the Link Lab. I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Xiamen University, China, in 2021. Working with interdisciplinary partners from medicine, nursing, psychology, and bioethics, I develop AI-enhanced ubiquitous sensing and intervention systems to enhance human health and well-being. I published in venues such as ACM IMWUT, CSCW, CHI, HEALTH, IEEE IoTJ, TMC, and SPJ HDS, interned at Johnson & Johnson and Baidu, and awarded honors such as 2024 CPS Rising Star and two UVA Engineering Endowed Fellowships for both research and teaching performance.

Keywords: Digital Health, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing, Human-Cenetered Interactive Technology

   News

• Sep 2024- Arxived one paper on LLM-enhanced palliative care communication evaluation [Link].

• Sep 2024- Excited to announce that I’ve been awarded the UVA Sture G. Olsson Endowed Fellowship.

• Jul 2024- My submission was selected to attend ACII 2024 Doctoral Consortium [Link].

• Jul 2024- Arxived one paper about neural-symbolic LLM-empowered autonomous agents [Arxiv].

• Jun 2024- One paper understanding social contexts using ambient audio was accepted by ACII 2024. Congrats to my 2nd-year undergrad mentee Varun who shared the co-first author with me!! What's more, this summer, Varun won the UVA TYDE Grand Challenge Undergrad Research Fellow.

• Jun 2024- One paper on evaluating palliative care clinical communication using wearables and NLP was accepted by ACM CSCW [Arxiv].

• Apr 2024- I was selected for Cyber-Physical System (CPS) Rising Stars 2024 [Web]!

• Apr 2024- Thrilled to announce I was awarded the UVA Engineering Teaching Fellowship and Ruthie Oxford End-of-Year Award!

• Mar 2024- This summer, will be working as a data science & digital health scientist intern at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine.

• Mar 2024- One paper on enhancing HIV mHealth patient-provider communication with LLMs was accepted by ACM CHI LBW.

• Dec 2023- Secured $87K research funding for developing an LLM societal information chatbot as a student-PI.

• Aug. 2023- One paper on quantitative analysis of privacy risks in digital phenotyping was accepted by IEEE BSN [Online]

• Jul. 2023- One paper on detecting socially anxious individuals' social contexts was accepted by ACM IMWUT [Online]

• Apr. 2023- One paper on state anxiety detection using linguistic biomarkers was accepted by IEEE EMBC [Arxiv].

• Feb. 2023- Check out a smartwatch prototype we designed for better patient-provider communication featured on UVA Engineering, Today, and Nursing. 

• Oct. 2022- Honored to give a student presentation on personalized ML for digital mental health in NSF-NIH SCH PI meeting!

• Jul. 2022- Our paper on mobile sensing in COVID-19 was accepted by SPJ Health Data Science [Featured on AAAS, Medical Press, News Medical]. 

• Feb. 2022- Our paper on mobile sensing for personalized medicine and population health was accepted by IEEE IoTJ [online]. 

• Aug 2021- I began my PhD journey at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA!

Selected Publications [Google Scholar] [Full List] (* indicates equal contributions, _ indicates my mentee student, ordered by pub year)

2024

1. CommSense: A Wearable-Based Computational Framework for Evaluating Patient-Clinician Interactions

Zhiyuan Wang, Nusayer Hassan, Virginia LeBaron, Tabor Flickinger, David Ling, James Edwards, Congyu Wu, Mehdi Boukhechba, Laura E. Barnes

ACM CSCW 2024 - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW) [Arxiv]

2. AudioInsight: Detecting Social Contexts Relevant to Social Anxiety from Speech

Zhiyuan Wang*, Varun Reddy*, Emma R. Toner, Maria A. Larrazabal, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, Laura E. Barnes 

AAAC ACII 2024 - 12th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (Oral) [Arxiv]

3. PALLM: Evaluating and Enhancing PALLiative Care Conversations with Large Language Models

Zhiyuan Wang*, Fangxu Yuan*, Virginia LeBaron, Tabor Flickinger, Laura E. Barnes

Arxiv [Online]

4. Converging Paradigms: The Synergy of Symbolic and Connectionist AI in LLM-Empowered Autonomous Agents

Haoyi Xiong, Zhiyuan Wang, Xuhong Li, Jiang Bian, Zeke Xie, Shahid Mumtaz, Laura E. Barnes

Arxiv [Online]

5. Rapport Matters: Enhancing HIV mHealth Communication through Linguistic Analysis and Large Language Models

Zhiyuan Wang, Varun Reddy, Karen Ingersoll, Tabor Flickinger, Laura E. Barnes

ACM CHI'EA 2024 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) Late Breaking Work [Online]

2023

6. Detecting Social Contexts from Mobile Sensing Indicators in Virtual Interactions with Socially Anxious Individuals

Zhiyuan Wang*, Maria A. Larrazabal*, Mark Rucker, Emma R. Toner, Katharine E Daniel, Shashwat Kumar, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, Laura E. Barnes

ACM IMWUT 2023 - Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies [Online]

7. Understanding Privacy Risks versus Predictive Benefits in Wearable Sensor-Based Digital Phenotyping: A Quantitative Cost-Benefit Analysis

Zhiyuan Wang*, Mark Rucker*, Emma R. Toner, Maria A. Larrazabal, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, Laura E. Barnes

IEEE BSN 2023 - IEEE-EMBS International Conference on Body Sensor Networks 2023 [Online]

8. Personalized State Anxiety Detection: An Empirical Study with Linguistic Biomarkers and A Machine Learning Pipeline

Zhiyuan Wang, Mingyue Tang, Maria A. Larrazabal, Emma R. Toner, Mark Rucker, Congyu Wu, Bethany A. Teachman, Mehdi Boukhechba, Laura E. Barnes

IEEE EMBC 2023 - 45th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2023. [Arxiv]

2022

9. Mobile Sensing in the COVID-19 Era: A Review

Zhiyuan Wang*, Haoyi Xiong*, Mingyue Tang, Mehdi Boukhechba, Tabor E Flickinger, Laura E. Barnes 

SPJ-HDS 2022 - Science Partner Journal Health Data Science, AAAS, 2022. [Online]

10. From Personalized Medicine to Population Health: a Survey of mHealth Sensing Techniques

Zhiyuan Wang, Haoyi Xiong, Jie Zhang, Sijia Yang, Mehdi Boukhechba, Daqing Zhang, Laura E. Barnes

IEEE IOTJ 2022 - IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022. [Online] [PDF]

I actively serve as the reviewer for related venues such as ACM IMWUT, CHI, CSCW, ISWC, MobileHCI, HEALTH, IMX, ISS; IEEE SMC, UIC, ICA3PP; JMIR, iScience, NPJ Mental Health Research, SPJ Health Data Science, program committee for ACM CHI LBW and IEEE UIC, and session chair for IEEE SIEDS.

Awards

1. 2024 UVA Engineering Sture G. Olsson Endowed Fellowship ($12K)

2. 2024 NSF Cyber-Physical System (CPS) Rising Star 

3. 2024 University of Virginia Engineering Teaching Fellowship (~$20K)

4. 2024 University of Virginia Ruthie Oxford Memorial Award

5. 2021 University of Virginia SIE Departmental Fellowship (1st year funding ~$50K)

6. 2020 Xiamen University Outstanding Undergrad Research Award and Funding (~$10K)

Media Coverage

1. A Cognitive Assistant on Your Doctor’s Smartwatch? | University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, 2023

2. Watch Your Words: CommSense Prototype Records and Assesses Bedside Conversations | UVA Today 2023

3. A Review on Mobile Sensing in the COVID-19 Era | AAAS EurekAlert! 2022

4. Publishing COVID-19 Risk Prediction Model in 2020 Baidu World Conference | Xiamen University School of Information (In Chinese) 2020