Zhiyuan Wang

I am a third-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 in 2021. My research lies at the intersection of mobile sensing, AI, and health. Working with interdisciplinary collaborators and stakeholders from medicine, nursing, psychology, and bioethics, I develop ubiquitous sensing and intervention systems to enhance human well-being. I received awards including 2024 CPS Rising Star, Departmental, and UVA Engineering Teaching Fellowships.

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

   News

• Jul 2024- Submission was accepted by ACII 2024 Doctoral Consortium - to appear in ACII main proceedings [Arxiv].

• Jul 2024- A paper about neural-symbolic LLM-empowered autonomous agents was released on Arxiv [Link].

• Jun 2024- A paper understanding social contexts using ambient audio was accepted by ACII2024. Congrats to my 2nd-year undergrad mentee Varun for his first co-primary-author paper with me!! What's more, this summer, Varun won the UVA TYDE Grand Challenge Undergrad Research Fellow.

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

• Apr 2024- Excited to receive the Ruthie Oxford End-of-Year Award recognizing my research achievement from the department.

• 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 will co-design and co-instruct a course in Fall 2024!

• April 2024 - Delivered an invited talk at UVA Cognitive Science CogFest- an insightful interdisciplinary experience!

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

• Mar 2024- A 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- A paper on quantitative analysis of privacy risks in digital phenotyping was accepted by IEEE BSN [Online]

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

• Apr. 2023- A paper on state anxiety detection using linguistic biomarkers will be presented in 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- Glad 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 HDS [Featured on AAAS, Medical Press, News Medical]. 

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

Selected Publications [Google Scholar] (* indicates equal contributions, _ indicates my mentee student, ^ indicates corresponding author, 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 - The 27th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

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)

3. Towards Context-Aware Sensing and Personalized Interventions for Mental Health

Zhiyuan Wang

AAAC ACII 2024 - 12th International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction (DC)

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 and 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]

9. Feasibility and Acceptability Testing of CommSense: A Novel Communication Technology to Enhance Health Equity in Clinician-Patient Interactions.

Virginia LeBaron^, Flickinger, Tabor, David Ling, David Lee, James Edwards, Anant Tewari, Zhiyuan Wang, Laura Barnes

DIGITAL HEALTH, 2023 [Online], [PDF]

2022

10. 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]

11. 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]

12. AFCS: Aggregation-Free Spatial-Temporal Mobile Community Sensing

Jiang Bian, Haoyi Xiong^, Zhiyuan Wang, Jingbo Zhou, Shilei Ji, Hongyang Chen, Daqing Zhang, Dejing Dou

IEEE TMC 2022 - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 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 NSF Cyber-Physical System (CPS) Rising Star 

2. 2024 University of Virginia Engineering Teaching Fellowship

3. 2024 University of Virginia SIE Department Ruthie Oxford Memorial Award

4. 2021 University of Virginia SIE Departmental Fellowship

5. 2020 Xiamen University Outstanding Undergrad Research Award and Funding

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