Jeff Huang
Brown University
Knowing You Better to do Helpful Things using User Behavioral Data

I will present work that leverages user behavioral data to build very personal applications. In the first project, we collect low-level interaction data online: mouse movement and scrolling data is used to infer which areas of a page has been examined in order to better find relevant search results on the Bing search engine. Then we use a normal laptop webcam to track where a user is looking on a page, by understanding the relationship between user interactions and eye gaze to automatically train an eye tracking model. The second project is work in progress that uses smartphone sensors in the physical world for personal informatics applications. We combine a computational and clinical approach to make semi-automated recommendations about how to improve a user's sleep using noise and movement data collected using smartphone sensors. Lastly, through the location monitoring services on the smartphone, we recreate an interactive visual and audio experience of past travel by combining historical weather data, street view photos, and environmental sounds.

Jeff Huang is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Brown University. His research interests span the intersection between human-computer interaction and information retrieval, involving the decoding of user behavioral data to drive novel applications. Jeff received his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington.