Goel Receives 2019 Google Faculty Research Award
In the Media
Mayank Goel, assistant professor with the School of Computer Science's HCII and ISR, recently received a 2019 Human-Computer Interaction Google Faculty Research Award.
The award by the tech juggernaut seeks to identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology. Structured as seed funding to support one graduate student for one year and awarded as an unrestricted gift, the award is highly competitive with only 15% of applicants receiving funding after a rigorous Google-wide review process.
Goel’s submission, “Teaching Old Sensors New Tricks to Enable Plug-and-Play Activity Recognition for Opportunistic Health Sensing”, aims to address the coarseness of health data collected by wearables. Goel plans to build an easily-trainable and general-purpose activity recognition system using sensors on wearables and smart speech assistants. Goel notes that this approach is designed to have a rapid, notable impact on health sensing. “Our approach combines sensing from smart speakers and smartwatches, which are two technologies quickly becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives,” he explains. “And by focusing deploying our work to end-users in the health domain, we can not only assure our approach works for actual users in the real world, but we can position this work to be useful and relevant in solving real problems that will have an immediate, significant impact.”
At CMU, Goel leads the Smart Sensing for Humans (SmaSH) Lab, which develops innovative sensing systems to develop solutions with immediate impact in the fields of health, accessibility, novel interactions, activity recognition, and technologies for the developing world.
Original story by Josh Quicksall, ISR Communications Specialist: ISR Researchers to Receive Google Faculty Research Awards