Software Mechanisms for Pervasive and Autonomous Computing

Speaker: Salma Elmalaki
Affiliation: Ph.D. Candidate - UCLA

Abstract:  Ubiquitous computing that interacts and adapts to humans is inevitable. In these pervasive systems, human reactions and behavior are observed and coupled into the loop of computation. The new generation of these autonomous systems has enabled a multitude of applications in the context of smart cities, healthcare, and automotive systems. By enabling autonomy into the essence of pervasive systems, these evolving systems not only provide services that are adaptable to the human context but also intervene and take actions that are tailored to the human reaction and behavior. The objective of this dissertation is to weave the personalization and context-awareness into the very fabric of autonomous pervasive systems.

The contributions of this dissertation are multi-fold. The first part of the thesis addresses the system software design to build context-aware applications that can adapt to different human and environment state. We introduce a framework for Android OS that can facilitate the implementation of the context-aware application. The second part of the thesis looks into the privacy concerns that arise from the adaptation of personalized systems where the human interactions and behavior can leak sensitive information. The third part focuses on designing machine-learning based systems to build adaptation and personalization services.  In this perspective, we show end-to-end applications that interact with humans and adapt to their needs and preferences. We focus on the area of context-aware driver assistance systems (ADAS). We show that by using the monitored human state to design driver-in-the-loop systems, these systems can provide personalized driving experience.

Biography:  Salma Elmalaki is a Ph.D. candidate affiliated with Networked and Embedded Systems Lab. (NESL) under the supervision of Professor Mani Srivastava. Her research interests include designing personalized and autonomous context-aware systems with special focus on performance, reliability, and privacy issues. She received her B.Sc. from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt in 2008 and received her M.Sc. from UCLA in 2014.  Before joining UCLA, she worked as an R&D engineer at Mentor Graphics.  Her work on context-aware system support landed her a Best Paper Award and a Best Community Paper Award at the International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ’15).  Salma was also selected as a Grace Hopper Scholar in 2016 and is the recipient of the Microsoft Research Fellowship (2016-2018).

For more information, contact Prof. Mani Srivastava (mbs@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Jun 12, 2018
10:30 am - 12:30 pm

Location:
E-IV Maxwell Room #57-124
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr. , Los Angeles CA 90095